A N O N Y M I T Y	Anonymous e-mailing (private and newsgroups) Fravia's Nofrill Web design (98 ~ 99)		updated September 1999	Fravia's Anonymity Academy Anonymous e-mailing (private and newsgroups) ~ It's actually a simple survival matter: anonymity on Usenet is, for instance, particularly important in these spamming days, if you don't want a flooded email address. ~ On this page [WWW anonymous emailing] [remailer list] [anonymous emailing (private)] [anonymous emailing (usenet)] [advanced tactics] [essays]

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What Fravia knows about you

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Anonymity on the Web is actually a simple survival matter: anonymity on Usenet is, for instance, particularly important in these spamming days to avoid flooded email addresses. Commercial vendors of all possible crap / gods / services / commodities that you DO NOT need in the least will gladly go over your dead body in order to fetch your email address! Therefore learn the basic of anonymous emailing here... courtesy of fravia's pages of reverse engineering.

Anonymous E-mail

Crack the post

WWW anonymous emailing (with your browser, duh)

Replay.com (works well per email as well, see below), and you may use also

www.c2.net, a nice one. Of course nym.alias.net (a second generation nymsever) could be useful as well. If you would like to

premail and chain remail you should realize, for your anonymous chain remailing, which remailers are the quickest remailers (real order depends from your location, time of the day, etc, just experiment a little...)

A list of anonymous remailers

First of all, here is a list of anonymous remailers (Bob Appleton's one, modified by fravia+. In order to obtain an up-to-date listing of anonymous remailers, with statistics, finger rlist@anon.efga.org or rlist@anon.lcs.mit.edu):

European remailers (begin with these if you distrust USA remailers)
mix@sind.hyperreal.art.pl  <-- these remailers can download files from the WWW and 
remailer@lo14.wroc.pl      <-- send them to you with the directive Get-Url
remailer@base.xs4all.nl    <-- "base" Same as replay.com, only slower.       

States' remailers
remailer@replay.com        <-- else you may use these reliable remailers
remailer@privacy.nb.ca     <-- Joseph "Anonymous" Howe     
remailer@anon.efga.org     <-- "Georgia Cracker" Anonymous Remailer 

Defunct remailers (yet one never knows...)
remailer@neva.org          <-- seems to be dead :-(
mix@earth.wazoo.com        <-- seems to be dead :-(

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Anonymous emailing (private)

Yet you may want a "simpler" way to send email anonymously, without browsing on line the sites given above, with the possibility of preparing your own automated scripts and even without any need to edit the email header if you don't happen to have a Unix box... basically, as you'll see below, you can use some remailers (which are simple automated mail handling bots, installed on various accounts, which will accept any message sent with the proper headers and automatically re-send it anonymously to whoever you want). You'll send email anonymously to your destinatary by sending mail to any of the remailers listed below, with the header "Anon-To: address" and the address that you want to send anonymously to. If you can't add headers to your mail (typical windoze user), you can place two colons on the first line of your message, followed by the "Anon-To:" line. Follow that with a blank line, and then begin your message.
Here follows a complete explanation:

 From: your@real.address    ;your real address is sent of course, yet don't worry
 To: remailer@replay.COM    ;this nice remailer will strip off your name
 Subject: Anonymous Mail    ;Subject will be transmitted, all the rest stripped off
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 ::                         ;place two colons on the first line of your message
 Anon-To: desti@nat.ary     ;and then the Anon-To line
 Latent-Time: +1:00r        ;instructing the remailer to delay randomly the message
 Cutmarks: --               ;any line beginning with the same text as in the 
                            ;cutmarks header, and any lines following it will 
                            ;be removed. Remember! Follow the :: block, after 
                            ;"Cutmarks: --", with at least ONE blank line!
 and this words ARE the text of your anonymous mail message, which begins 
 only AFTER the blank lines after "Cutmarks: --". So this is all anonymized 
 stuff, and you write, and write and write, but remember to choose your 
 "Cutmarks", I have used two dashes, as in good old (and now unfortunately 
 defunct) anon.penet times, therefore THIS line of my text would be sent
 --
 but THIS line of my text will not be anonymously sent

Warning: If you forget the trailing blank after the "--" in the "Cutmarks:" directive, your signature (some email_programs automatically insert a signature file which usually contains the sender's e-mail address, and would reveal their identity) won't be cut off.
Don't underestimate the importance of NOT betraying your timezone when you post (that's one of the first elements a stalker would use to track you, see my enemy page). You create a random delay by adding an 'r' to the time (+1:00r), which in the case above would have the message be delivered at a random time, but not more than an hour. You can also delay the message until a specific time. For example, "Latent-Time: 0:00" without the '+' would delay the message until midnight (at the remailer site). Times must be in 24-hour format. Anyway modern remailers automatically reorder all messages in a large pool, which produces a similar random effect even if you forget the time directive..
If your message has a "Get-URL:" header, the remailer will try to retrieve the URL you have indicated with an external WWW client, ASCII- armor it with PGP, and append it to the message. After that, the message will be processed as usual. Note howebver that the WWW client of the polish remailers can access only HTTP and FTP URLs

Should the above instructions still not be enough for you, just send this

email as it is (answer OK to Navigator's question about not having written anything in the text, Opera will handle everything orright) and wait for the remailer answer sipping your favourite

cocktail and wandering around inside my site.
The following part, about usenet posting, offers a bunch of other tips that are valid for private posting as well. So read it :-)

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Anonymous emailing (Usenet)

Now let's see the simple way to post anonymously on Usenet.
And here is how you should proceed:


To:   		(use one of the remailers from above)
Subject: 	(leave blank)
------------------------------------------------------
Body: 		::					<--1st line of body
      		Anon-Post-To: xxx.yyy,xxx.yyy,xxx.yyy	<--2nd line of body
							<--3rd line of body
      		##					<--4th line of body
      		Subject: (put the subject here)		<--5th line of body
							<--6th line of body
      		<start message here>                    <--7th line of body

NOTE TO THE ABOVE INSTRUCTIONS:
The 1st line of the body of your anonymous posting must contain 2 colons.
2nd line; substitute "xxx.yyy" with the newsgroups you are interested in.
The 3rd line must be blank The 5th line carries the subject you want in your posting
The 6th line must be blank
Start your message on the 7th line.

NOTA BENE!

all group names (if you crosspost to more than one newsgroup) must be separated by commas (but NO spaces).
The reason for the 4th line containing a # is that additional headers can be written to the output message by preceding them with a "##" line (multi-line headers with indented continuation lines are allowed... an indented line in a message header indicates a continuation of the previous line, duh) Therefore:
```
##
Reply-To: 	bgates@msn.com
Subject: 	A message with user-supplied headers: the subject extends
	 	for instance over two lines
```
When posting your test messages (ALWAYS POST TEST MESSAGES FIRST somewhere and check them, you never know what for 'concealed add-ons' your last frizzy-dilly version of M$ Outlook may have added in your postings!), use the appropriate groups (alt.test, misc.test). Take care, tough, these very groups are (on purpose) routinely checked by nasty 'fishers' looking for gullible lusers, take care therefore that your message looks the most 'inoffensive' as possible (unless you want to try to lure them, but that's a completely different history, see my luring and social engineering tricks page).
In order to post an anonymous follow-up article and have it appear in a thread, you must set the "Subject:" and "References:" headers of your message correctly: to build a references header, copy the references header of the article to which you are replying, and append that article's Message-ID. If you are replying to the first article of a thread, it won't have a references header. In that case just use the article's Message-ID as your references header.

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Advanced tactics

For added security, you can encrypt your messages to the remailer with PGP. The remailer software will decrypt the message and send it on. This is especially useful if you are anonymously emailing from your workplace. To utilize this feature, create a message with two colons on the first line, then the "Anon-To:" or "Anon-Post-To:" header, then any other commands such as "Cutmarks:" or "Latent-Time:", then a blank line, then the optional "##" line and your additional headers, then a blank line, and then the body of your message. Encrypt this with the remailer's public key (in order to get it, just email your favourite remailer with the word 'help' without the inverted commas, both in the Subject and in the Body of your posting). Then send your encrypted anonymous posting to the remailer, adding the header "Encrypted: PGP". If you forget this, the remailer won't know that it needs to be decrypted. Also be sure to use the "-t" option with PGP, or the linefeeds might not be handled properly.
Any text after your encrypted remailer message is also remailed. This allows sending messages to someone who is anonymous. If you create a PGP-encrypted message to yourself via this remailer, and then give it to someone, they can send you a message by sending the encrypted message to the remailer. The remailer will then decrypt it and send it to you. The message gets anonymized in the process, so the sender will need to include a return address if he wants a reply.

Messages sent this way can be encrypted using the "Encrypt-Key:" feature. Any text following a line containing only "**" (without quotes) will be encrypted with this key. For example, if you put in the plaintext of your PGP message:
```
::
Anon-To: you@yourhost.org
Encrypt-Key: your_password

**
```
The appended message after the "**" will be encrypted with the key "your_password", using PGP's conventional encryption option. If you omit the "**" marks, the message will be discarded to prevent traffic analysis by sending intercepted messages with the "**" marks removed.

It is much simpler to manage these "reply blocks" -- both from the sender's and recipient's perspective -- by using a nymserver. Please visit http://www.publius.net/n.a.n.html for more information (homepage of nym.alias.net, the home of the nymserver software).
To confuse possible attackers even more, you can generate some cover traffic by sending encrypted messages with the special "Null:" header rather than the usual "Anon-To:" or "Anon-Post-To:" headers. The remailer will drop these messages in the bit bucket.
AOL, Compuserve, Infonie and all other BIG dynamic IP providers have been called "the largest anonymous remailers in the world,". They allow up to eight screen email-names, each of which is a pseudonym traceable only by the dynamic provider on request by law enforcement. Yet, disks offering various free months trial periods are quite easy to come by. I don't think you need more to understand what this implies (if you'r connecting to the web from your portable 'on the road', that is :-)
Of course a real reverser may want to have a look at the c code of a remailer in order to improve it, crack it, or just understand it :-)
And try This inference query for more info...

Now, if you have never done it before, go ahead and try a couple of simple anonymous emailings first. Leave the advanced stuff and settings for later. Email yourself and choose as subject 'my first anonymous email'. In a couple of months time, if you study some of the tips above, you won't believe that you were not able to do it before :-)

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