There are remailers that will receive mail from you, remove ALL headers, including any identify you or your ISP, and send the message on to whomever you specify. These services are free, and anyone can do this. You do not need an account. Since the "From: " and "Subject: " headers will also be removed, the recipient will have no idea where the message came from unless you tell him. You can do this from your hotmail account, or from your home account.

The idea is that you must add three lines at the very beginning of each message you want remailed. The first line, in the upper left hand corner of the message, consists of two colons (and [enter], no spaces). The second line carries your friend's e-mail address, and must look exactly like this: Anon-To: friend@hisisp.com ...And third line must be blank (only [enter]). Then you start your regular message on the fourth line. It looks like this:

::
Anon-To: friend@hisisp.com
... (blank line) ...
You message starts here on the fourth line.

If you wish to add a Subject line, or a Reply-To line, notice at the bottom of this page the instructions for doing so, but this is not necessary.

Then send the complete message to one of the remailers listed below.

I have added typical delay times, location, and "middle" when they automatically route your message to another remailer for added security. Times are averages. Often it takes much less time. The htp remailer is somewhat newer and may not carry as much traffic, in case you are concerned about spooks monitoring the traffic entering and leaving the remailer, but there are tricks - "cutmarks" and "latent time" - that can help in this regard. Look for them elsewhere if you are interested. If you have concerns of this magnitude, you really should be using nymservers anyway - contact me for details. These remailers are listed roughly in order of traffic. Replay forwards many messages every minute, in random order.

Try sending a message to yourself and see what it looks like.

These remailers are operated by individuals, some of them considered modern day computer folk heroes, no matter who provides the equipment. There are occassions when they will be down for a few hours or, on a weekend, a day or two. There are two ways for a remailer to be down. If they are offline, you will get a bounced-mail notice back that your message could not be delivered to them. If only the program has crashed, but not the host computer (this is usually the case) your mail will be received and stored until the remailer program is up and running again, and will be processed soon after. You will not have any notice of this. If you suspect that this has happened, send yourself some mail and see if the remailer is working. Then you have the choice of waiting, or sending a second copy of the message through another remailer, and hope that your recipient won't mind.

I will try to post any remailer crashes to BC as soon as I notice them, and this is normally a problem only on weekends. If you want to judge the condition of the remailers for yourself, here's how:

If you wish to do a little extra work, as mentioned above, you can instruct the remailer to add additional lines to the header of the message. No - not the From: header, but several other useful ones. Feel free to try any header you like. Suppose you want to include a Subject: header and a Reply-To: header. This will be quite useful since most mail software will "reply" to the Reply-To: address (if there is one) instead of the From: address.

Below the mandatory first three lines of your message, add:
Line four - two hash marks ( ## )
Line five - a header such as this - Subject: this is a test message
Line six - a header such as this - Reply-To: you@hotmail.com
Line seven - must be a blank line
Line eight - start your message on this line

You can add one header, or several. Most types of headers are allowed. All of this is strictly optional, and you may not want to do all this extra typing. Note that the header titles must be capitalized, and the colon and single space must be typed exactly as shown. Here is what our entire example would look like with "hashed" headers.

::
Anon-To: friend@hisisp.com
... (blank line) ...
##
Subject: this is a test message
Reply-To: you@hotmail.com ... (blank line) ...
Your message starts here on the next line.

For further ideas about how to get these remailers to do what you want, check out all the details on Cypherpunk Remailers for the complete story.