I thought that most or all of the cypherpunk anonymous remailers don't keep records. Not even on backup tapes. The whole idea is that there aren't logs. But maybe they have found some remailers that are
When a person recieves a message from someone using an anonymous remailer, the return address will usually work, depending on the remailer. The return address is for an address on the remailer, and sending to that address, the remailer will forward the message back to the person who owns that anonymous address. The problem with that, of course, is that the remailer has to keep a record of who owns each anonymous account, so that it can direct the replies to the anonymous person. These records could be siezed. Also (not related to the records), if the remailer does not encrypt the replies that it forwards to the anonymous owner, it would be *very* vunlerable to traffic analysis... Just watch for your message leaving the remailer, and see the address of the anonymous person, or the address of the next remailer in the chain. I don't really know much about remailers, but I don't think there's much to know... If I'm mistaken about any of the above, I'm sure someone will correct me. BTW, has anyone out there created an anonymous web forwarder? I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who don't like the idea of having their email address in the log files of dozens of web servers... Creating a simple web forwarder wouldn't be hard.