What is a Remailer?
A remailer is a service that provides anonymity to the sender of an email or newsgroup post by acting as an intermediary between the sender and receiver. The sender’s message goes first to the remailer, which strips away the headers associated with the sender, replacing them with its own. It then forwards the mail to its final destination. The receiver cannot deduce the origin of the mail or post by looking at its headers —- only the remailer’s headers will appear. There are a myriad of practical reasons to use a remailer. For example, remailers can provide anonymous participation in USENET support groups to keep employers, or even children and spouses from “Googling” personal posts. Remailers provide people of every country the opportunity for free speech, even where local governments forbid it. They also protect the sender when the nature of the message might cause personal repercussions, as in the case of a whistleblower. For the average Internaut, a remailer can be a useful tool fo
A remailer is a program that runs on a computer somewhere on the Internet. It allows you to send electronic mail to a news group, or to a person, without revealing your true name or email address to the recipient. When you send mail to the remailer address, the remailer takes your name and your address off of the mail header and forwards it to its next destination. The recipient gets mail that has no evidence of where it originally came from, at least not in the headers.
A remailer is a program that runs on a computer somewhere in the Internet. It allows you to send electronic mail to a news group, or to a person, without revealing your true name or e-mail address to the recipient. When you send mail to the remailer address, the remailer takes your name and your address off of the mail header and forwards it to its next destination. The recipient gets mail that has no evidence of where it originally came from, at least not in the headers.
A remailer is a computer service which privatizes your email. High-quality remailers are in sharp contrast to the normal email account at the average Internet Service Provider [ISP]. These accounts tend to be terribly un-private. In many cases, ISP could accurately stand for “Internet Surveillance Project”. Almost every ISP can monitor, store and share your web wanderings and email with many “authorized persons” or “drinking buddies” without your knowledge. If caught, the ISP snoops have a built-in excuse: to wit, “We check mail at random as part of our ‘security’ system to protect our clients.” In many countries, ISPs are explicitly monitored by government agencies for ‘security’ reasons, for trade secrets, for diplomatic gossip, etc.
Let’s look at ordinary e-mails for a moment first. They all carry the same From:, To:, and Subject: fields. But they also carry invisible fields that will include your e-mail server domain’s name, IP address, the time and the date your e-mail was send, and any other info. These fields are called headers. Just by their names alone, remailers should be clear to you as to what they do-they re-send E-mail. But they not only blindly re-send the mail, no sir! They also strip the headers so nobody should know where the message came from and/or who was the original sender. They make sending anonymous E-mail possible. A remailer will also pass the message along to other remailers if that’s the poster wanted. From there, the message can get passed along some more, or it can go to its final destination. A remailer is nothing more than a specialized server running a software. A little history Remailers started way back in 1990s. The most famous was Anon.Penet.Fi run by Johan Helsinius of Oy Peneti
