Remailer list

This is an automatically generated listing of remailers. The first part of the listing shows the remailers along with configuration options and special features for each of the remailers. The second part shows the 12-day history, and average latency and uptime for each remailer. You can also get this list by fingering remailer-list@kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu.

This is a (more or less) comprehensive listing of the type-1 remailers. The Mixmaster remailers are listed separately in the Mixmaster list.

History key

# response in less than 5 minutes.
* response in less than 1 hour.
+ response in less than 4 hours.
- response in less than 24 hours.
. response in less than 2 days.
_ response in more than 2 days.

cpunk: A major class of remailers. Supports Request-Remailing-To: field.
eric: A variant of the cpunk style. Uses Anon-Send-To: instead.
penet: The third class of remailers (at least for right now). Uses X-Anon-To: in the header.
pgp: Remailer supports encryption with PGP. A period after the keyword means that the short name, rather than the full email address, should be used as the encryption key ID.
hash: Supports ## pasting, so anything can be put into the headers of outgoing messages.
ksub: Remailer always kills subject header, even in non-pgp mode.
nsub: Remailer always preserves subject header, even in pgp mode.
latent: Supports Matt Ghio's Latent-Time: option.
cut: Supports Matt Ghio's Cutmarks: option.
post: Post to Usenet using Post-To: or Anon-Post-To: header.
ek: Encrypt responses in reply blocks using Encrypt-Key: header.
special: Accepts only pgp encrypted messages.
mix: Can accept messages in Mixmaster format.
reord: Attempts to foil traffic analysis by reordering messages. Note: I'm relying on the word of the remailer operator here, and haven't verified the reord info myself.
mon: Remailer has been known to monitor contents of private email.
filter: Remailer has been known to filter messages based on content. If not listed in conjunction with mon, then only messages destined for public forums are subject to filtering.

Society and remailers

André Bacard's anonymous remailer FAQ is an excellent nontechnical introduction.
Remailers are starting to show up in the popular press, including these two articles in Wired, and anti-anonymity editorials in the Wall Street Journal (a rebuttal was written by Avi Baumstein) and San Francisco Chronicle (by Martha Siegel herself, no less!). I wrote a response to the latter, but it didn't get printed. Peter Lewis wrote a front page article for the New York Times that had most of its facts wrong. A better attempt was made by Reid Kanaley in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Thanks to Avi Baumstein for putting these documents and others related to anonymity on the Web.
Another recent news item is the compromise of anon.penet.fi as a result of a Scientology complaint. Only one name was obtained (originally they wanted the entire database), but the legal situation remains unclear. Here's a post describing what happened and press release from Johan Helsingius. There was a story in Time Magazine by Joshua Quittner. Daniel Akst of the LA Times wrote a column about the incident, as well.
For a somewhat, ah, er, different take on Net anonymity, hop over to L.Detweiler's home page. By the way, he tells me that I am an "outsider" relative to the cypherpunks. This may come as a surprise to the many who have been following my involvement with the remailer network and PGP. However, Mr. Detweiler knows (better than I) that I don't really subscribe to the hidden "black" cypherpunk agenda.

Tools

I have written premail, a mail client which automatically prepares outgoing mail for the remailers, and also transparently handles PGP encryption. Premail is fairly easy to set up. Once this is done, it will take care of all the details for you, including automatically choosing remailers based on this list. As yet, there is no support for Mixmaster or alpha.c2.org, but stay tuned.
Version 3.3 of mailcrypt is out, and it directly supports remailers and PGP encryption. It's pretty much an Emacs implementation of premail. Anyone who uses Emacs for their news and mail should definitely check this one out. It can automatically load the information from this remailer list.
Private Idaho is an anonymous remailer utility for Windows, supporting PGP, the cypherpunks remailers, and Mixmaster, and the alpha.c2.org alias server. It too automatically configures itself based on this remailer list.
ChainMail is a remailer chaining utility for Mac users, by Jonathan Rochkind. To use it, you need Eudora, MacPGP, and applescript, in addition to a number of applescript scripting additions.
Privtool is a PGP-aware mailer that also supports Mixmaster.
New: The Community ConneXion has put the Web-premail gateway on its SSL server. That means that you can send anonymous email from the Web without exposing your message in the clear on the connection between your Web browser and the gateway. Good stuff.
Sameer Parekh's NEXUS Berkeley / Community ConneXion has a web page set up for sending anonymous mail from your Web client.
Michael Hobbs has set up Web gateway to premail. Now you can send anonymous email directly from your Web browser. Don't use this for extremely sensitive stuff, though, because it isn't quite as secure as running premail yourself (in particular, the connection between your Web browser and the gateway is not encrypted).

Remailer help

A good source for remailer information is the Anonymity, remailers, and your privacy page compiled by "Galactus". This is also the best place to look for information about anon.penet.fi.
Matt Ghio's remailer list is available by fingering remailer.help.all@chaos.taylored.com. This file also has all the public keys for PGP-friendly remailers. Matt also has a pinging service similar to this one, available by fingering remailer-list@chaos.taylored.com. Update: Chaos is having problems getting recognized on the Net. Try remailer.help.all@204.95.228.28 and see if that works any better. Last I checked, the information here was more than a month out of date. Newer information can be gotten by sending mail to mg5n+remailers@andrew.cmu.edu.
Replay remailer help.
Penet remailer help.
Help for Matt Ghio's alias system for creating anonymous addresses. I'm not sure if this service is still supported.
Help for the Alpha alias server (also available in a plain email version). In my opinion, this is the best way to create an alias for anonymous replies to mail. Not only is it the most cryptographically secure, but you get to pick the alias nickname of your choice. The email addresses are of the form alias@alpha.c2.org. Highly recommended.

Remailers have home pages too!

Usura's home page has a bunch of remailer related stuff on it, including a help page on chaining remailers.
The Armadillo remailer now has its own Web page.
Crown remailer help and statistics.
Ecafe remailer has its own Web page, including quickie info about how to use the remailer without encryption or any other extras.

Other resources

You want to send secure mail to someone, but don't know their key. Where are you going to get it? Try the keyserver at MIT.
The cypherpunks ftp site has some remailer related stuff in it.
Vince Cate's Cryptorebel and Cypherpunk page has pointers to lots of cypherpunk resources.
John Perry's jpunix page has info on his MX service for hidden remailers, as well as cool links for Mixmaster and other stuff.
Lance Cottrell's home page, which has his Chain script, the Mixmaster remailer client (including Sun binaries!) as well as other cypherpunk related topics.
Vince Gambino's remailer page has a good collection of remailer help files.
Now you can get MIT PGP 2.6.2 directly off the Web.

Suggestions and more links are highly welcomed.

Raph Levien home