PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, written by cyberhero Phil Zimmerman, is the only serious tool used for encryption. This is like placing a letter into an envelope, rather than mailing a postcard. Yet this seemingly basic right is forbidden in the Communist world, France, and much of the middle east. Everyone of us needs to have the capability to handle PGP. Only your browser's built-in credit-card encryption tools, used when making purchases over the internet, uses a different encryption system. While the pretty PGP 5.0 (Win95) will allow you to encrypt messages to send to people, you will need to download the more basic program, one of the PGP 2.6 versions (depending whether you are within the USA or not), for anonymity purposes. This is because all the anonymity software, the remailer's software, and the nymserver's software deals with PGP 2.6 only. This will allow you to not only encrypt your message, but to encrypt the addresses where it is going to, and in effect where it is coming from....anonymity. You will also have to set up PGP's directory and configuration file so that it will do what you want, and so that your other software can find it when it needs to. More detail about PGP can be found in the new All About PGP page (when written) and other various places on this site.

Remailers are computers that will remail a message for you free, after removing all of the e-mail headers (like From: ... Reply-To: ... Originating ISP IP: ... Subject: ... ). You must tell it where to send the message. This is like depositing your a letter in any postal letter-box so that its source cannot be traced. Some governments take a dim view of untraceable mail, but none seem to have found a way to outlaw it. The USA was founded on the concept of "anonymous pamphleteering". We will be discussing Cypherpunk, or Type I, remailers. Cypherpunks were hackers that created the techniques and programs to make all this possible. They are now involved with advanced forms of encryption research. Remailers will accept messages encrypted with PGP (there are only a handful that will also accept plain text - unencrypted - messages) so that mail leaving your home e-mail account will not reveal the content of messages nor the recipient. You can also tell it to post the message to a newsgroup (anonymously), encrypt it (probably one additional time), delay it, add/remove padding to change it's size, and forward it to other remailers. This is where maximum security comes in. Chaining remailers makes it completely impossible for anyone (yes anyone) to trace the path of a message. Normally, chained remailers will use an additional layer of encryption (that only the next remailer can decrypt) for each step of the chain. Remailers keep no logs. Many remailers can use an extremely-high-security encryption system (called Mixmaster, or Type II) to pass messages between them, further confounding any attempt at tracing. These remailers are the heart of the nymserver system. All the details are available on the Cypherpunk Remailers page (when written).

Reply-Blocks are blocks of encrypted remailing instructions. I could make up a set of instructions that said, in effect, "send this to Spike at home" (using the Anon-To: command), PGP encrypt it so that only the neva.org remailer could read it, and then freely distribute it to all my friends. They could then paste this code-block at the beginning of a message to me, and semd the whole thing to remailer@neva.org. My friends could send me messages right here at home, yet they would not know what my home e-mail address is. Such a code-block is called a reply-block, and anything following it (like your message) will be sent along for the ride. Unfortunately, I have very few friends who know how to cut-and-paste (they are all Win95 wimps), so this is not of much use to me. Yet I have to make up just such a reply-block, and submit it to a nymserver, if I expect the nymserver to be able to forward my incoming mail to me here at home. Actually, I make up one for remailer#1 to read, telling it to forward to me, then I preceed that with a reply-block telling remailer#2 to forward to remailer#1, then I preceed that with a reply- block telling remailer#3 to forward to remailer#2, then I tell my nymserver to forward the who thing (plus my mail) to remailer#3. At each step, I encrrypt it again so that only the intended remailer can decrypt these instructions. If you want to try a simple reply-block with a friend, make one up, send it to him, and tell him which remailer it must be sent to. He must paste it at the beginning of his message, and must also preceed it with two colons, a header which reads Encrypted: PGP , and a blank line. Any encrypted reply-block sent to a rermailer must be preceeded by this header, if you expect the remailer to try to edcrypt it.