Berkman Mostly Anonymous Remailing Service

To register a new alias or remove an existing alias fill out the form below and click on the respective button. For a description of the mostly anonymous remailing service, see the text below. If you need help after reading everything on this page, mail the administrator.

Alias (if your alias is 'foo', your anonymous email is 'anon_foo@eon.law.harvard.edu')
Password
Email (your existing email address, for example 'linus@linux.com')

Once you have registered, just send email from your normal email address (the address you put in the email box above) and the system will take care of anonymizing your return address for you.

Description

The Berkman mostly anonymous remailing service allows users transparently to exchange emails with one another without knowing each others' email addresses and without revealing real email addresses in the process. Instead of merely forwarding the email to the anonymous recipient, the remailer replaces the address of the sender with her own anonymous address before remailing the message out to the real address of the recipient. This process allows correspondants to communicate anonymously with one another with their existing email accounts, removing the burden on the user of having to configure her desktop client to read and send email from a new account.

The system is mostly anonymous because the systems maintains a list that associates real and anonymous addresses, as well as a log of emails sent, making it possible for the administrator of the system to determine the real address of a given message. You can trust the anonymity of the system as much as you trust the administrator of the system (in this case, the Berkman Center).

The best way to describe the remailer is to step through the process the system goes through with each email:

  1. When an email is received with an anonymous address (anon_ms@eon.law.harvard.edu) as the recipient, the system first tries to look up the anonymous address that corresponds to the real address (stevejobs@apple.com) of the sender.
  2. If the system does not have an anonymous address that corresponds to the real address of the sender, the email is returned to the sender with a note informing the sender that he must have an anonymous address registered with the system to use the remailer.
  3. If the system does have an anonymous address that corresponds to the real address of the sender, the system replaces the real address of the sender with the anonymous address of the sender and remails the message to the real recipient address.

The end result of the above process is that Joe can send an email from his normal email account to an anonymous address and know that not only will the address be delivered to the intended recipient, but the mail will look as if it has come from Joe's anonymous address. The recipient can likewise respond to Joe's anonymous address from his normal account and know that Joe will receive the email but will only see the anonymous sending address.