How do I send an Anonymous Email?
In this day and age, most people are exchanging the pen and paper for a computer with a word processing progamme. Nowadays, the alternative to sending messages via snail mail is the use of the Internet to send electronic mail. Sometimes people wish to remain anonymous when sending messages. This comes in handy for various reasons, whether for privacy protection, to avoid embarrassment of any sort, or to voice an opinion without fear of direct retaliation from another party. This is done through use of remailers, which, in essence, are machines that send the message on to the final party and remove any traces tracking it back to the sender. However, since the remailer does know the source of the message and its destination and content, anonymity may be compromised. So, unless two or more remailers are used, those nasty emails you write that annoyingly opinionated jerk on your favorite "Sopranos" message board could be linked back to you.
Here are the steps required to create and send an anonymous email:
- Find and choose at least two functional and reliable remailers. Not all remailers are always online or functional, but it is possible to investigate the reliability of a remailer before using it.
- Get the public PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) keys of the remailers. This will allow the message to be encrypted for anonymity and privacy. It is important to know the public keys of both remailers. To do this, either the program PGP Home 9.0 or GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) must be installed. They can be used to download the PGP keys for the remailers.
- Open Notepad. Any other plain text editor available will also work.
- On the first line type "::".
- Enter "Anon-To:" followed by the recipient's email address. Leave one line blank then begin typing the message.
- Save the file to the Desktop as "mail.txt."
- On Windows, select 'Run' from the Start menu and type "cmd" and press Enter. On other platforms, open a command prompt.
- Use "cd" to go to your Desktop directory. This is what it looks like on windows, "cd c:\Documents and Settings\menon\Desktop".
- Type in "gpg-ea-r [last remailer address] remail.txt.". Replace [last remailer address] with the email address of the last remailer in the chain. If two are being used, the last one is the second remailer's address. For example, to send an anonymous email through remailer@aarg.net then through anon@paranoici.org, type in "gpg-ea-r anon@paranoici.org mail.txt".
- Press Enter. GnuPG should ask for verification that the message is encrypted to an unverified key. Type "y" and Press Enter.
- Open the encrypted mail.txt file in Notepad. The file might be named "mail.txt.asc" or simply "mail.asc." Type "::" in the first line and press Enter.
- Type "Anon-To:" followed by email address of the last remailer in the chain. The next to last remailer needs to send the message to the last remailer. This is the email address for which the message was encrypted.
- Leave one line blank, type in "::" and press Enter, then type Encrypted: PGP". Be sure that there is another empty line before the encrypted message starts.
- Save the file as "mail.txt" again and overwrite the existing file.
- Go back on the command line and type "gpg-ea-r [next but last remailer address] mail.txt". Replace this [next but last remailer address] with the email address of the next but last remailer in the chain.
- GnuPG should ask for verification that the message is encrypted to an unverified key. Type "y" and press Enter. This should overwrite the existing "mail.asc" file. Open the file again and enter "::" at the top, followed, in the next line, by "Encrypted: PGP", and leave one line blank, again, before the message starts.
- Press CTRL-A (or ALT-A depending on the platform) to select the entire text, then CTRL-C or ALT-C to copy.
- Create a new message in the email service and address it to the first remailer in the chain. Then paste the text in the message and send.
Following these instructions should send the message to the remailers before it reaches the recipient of the message, without tracing it back to the sender.
|
|
Bookmark How do I send an Anonymous Email?
