An anonymous remailer, on the Internet, is a sort of proxy e-mail service through which users can send mail; the remailer will strip from the e-mail any headers identifying the source machine, and then send it along to its intended recipient. In this way people can send e-mail without revealing their IP address. Instead, the routing headers will indicate that the e-mail was sent from the anonymous remailer.
I’d like to know if there is a real-world version of the anonymous remailer. That is, are there any services to which you can post a stamped envelope inside a stamped envelope, such that they will open and remove the outer envelope, and then drop the inner envelope back in the mail for you? This way the letter will arrive to its recipient without a postmark from the sender’s locality. Instead, the postmark will be from the locality of the anonymous remailer.
I don’t know as they were ever free. I used one back in the late 1980s and had to pay a fee which covered not only my sending a letter to them, but also any letters sent to me via them.
Of course – there are plenty of legitimate reasons why people would like to send mail anonymously, or not anonymously but without revealing their location: people who wish to report crimes and other misbehaviour without fear of retribution, legal communication with people against whom you have a restraining order or who are likely to stalk you, harmless jokes and pranks (e.g., telling your friends you’re going to Uzbekistan, and then “proving” it by sending them a postcard from there). In fact, one of the services offered by that site is remailing from North Pole, Alaska, so that parents can send their children letters from Santa with a North Pole postmark.
I suppose the services could be abused by using them to harass people anonymously, but this isn’t any bigger a problem than using, say, using your telephone to do so and blocking caller ID, or sending e-mail from an Internet café with a one-time web mail account.
If one is talking about snail mail (U.S. postal service) you don’t have to use a pay service for remailing (though most of them are very inexpensive).
I’ve used remailing for some investigations I was working on. To save the fee of the remailing service I simply mailed the item I wanted remailed to the postmaster of the city I wanted postmarked on the item.
I’m in Milwaukee. I want to mail a letter to someone in Little Rock. But I want them to think I’m in Denver. I put my letter in an envelope, address it to them in Little Rock and stamp it. Then I put that envelope into another envelope and mail it to the postmaster in Denver. Postmaster in Denver opens the envelope, sees that it’s another envelope stamped and addressed to Little Rock. He throws it in the outgoing bin. It gets postmarked in Denver and sent to Little Rock.
yeah there are a few that seem legit and typically cost about $2 for each letter that’s to be re-mailed. it depends on where you are, but there’s one called Private Remailer that sends from a town in Idaho. I used it once to resolve an issue for a family member being stalked, and it went through fine and pretty quick.
didn’t realize until just now how old this thread was. I had just been searching around for forums on the topic of letter remailing and found this. sorry if it seemed a bit spammy, not my intention (since I’m not affiliated with that link I posted)
I remember back in the 80’s seeing ads for them in the back of Popular Science/Mechanics/Electronics magazines alongside the ads for hovercraft and pain field generator plans.
