I believe you are correct. Johan Helsingius operated the world's most popular anonymous remailer, called penet.fi, until he closed up shop in September 1996. Helsingius' troubles started when he was raided in 1995 by the Finnish police after the Church of Scientology complined that a penet.fi customer was posting the "church's" secrets on the Net. Helsingius mothballed the remailer after a Finnish court ruled he must reveal the customer's real e-mail address. On Tue, 19 Sep 2000, BMM wrote:

Perhaps the penet remailer, which shut down in 9/96, is the one > being referred to. See http://www.penet.fi. If memory serves, > it was by far the most popular (pseudo|ano)nymous of the time.

On Tue, 19 Sep 2000, Kevin Elliott wrote:

...

At 12:43 -0400 9/19/00, Asymmetric wrote: Actually asshole, there are plenty of anonymous remailers that >> DO let you reply to the originator. In case you're just a bit >> wet behind the ears yet and hadn't heard, a while back there >> was a big problem with one of them when the government ordered >> them to release their database mapping the pseudonyms back to >> the originators.

Oh? Name one please. After all, it would sort of defeat the purpose... As to your comment about having a database mapping pseudonyms to names, if one of those exists for a given >> remailer, it's not an ananymous remailer. I certainly hope >> none of the remailers in use by users here do such things.