OK I'll partially retract the anti-government ranters comment since Tim wants to be included in it :-) I think it was clear where the comment was aimed however...
The Kleinpaste/Julf "remailer" lacks basic security provisions, and is more properly called an "anonymizing service," in my opinion. (I'm not familiar with the "Stephi" story, but I know Kleinpaste wrote up a simple anonymizing service, which he claims he did in one evening, and decided not to support it; he transferred the code to Julf, who supported and (I presume) enhanced it, and the rest is history).
All you need to do to have a complete history of the remailer history is to add in the event that caused Kleinpaste to write the code.. I remember now, Wizvax may well have been a VMS machine and hence not congenial to having its code ported off. It seems that Tim did not explore the less salubrious areas of the net but the closing down of Wizvax and the first anonymizing mailer was closely followed by another service whose name I forget but the name Kleinpaste certainly rings a bell. 1992 would be about the right time period as well. Elf Sternberg at Compuserve might well remember the rest of the story. I agree that the Julf mailer had big problems operations wise but I fear that the current mixmaster setup is a bit too unweildy for naive use. Like PGP I tend to see it as an advert to the authorities that you are likely to be up to no good. The CIA can probably find the information they really want by simply tracking PGP messages on the net and doing trafic analysis, same goes for the mixmaster class servers and the problem remains that there is no response facility. I had an idea for an anonymous contact server in the Julf mould that was resistant to the legal attack. No logs of email addresses would ever be kept, to retreive responses from the server one would have to send a retrieval request to it, possibly including a password. For one time uses this would be enough. But if you wanted to get more comprehensive deniability you could require use of encryption and send back all the messages recieved within a particular partition of the database. Its pretty difficult to get a good system that allows a two way communication to be sustained. The idea was inspired by the crypto-SPAM refusal list that I'm currently doing a beta test on, try:- http://etna.ai.mit.edu/SPAM/ Just don't tell the censorware folks... Phill