The anon.penet.fi Anonymous Server
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Yes, another anonymous server. Why?  Well, several well-known servers have
bitten the dust recently. And most of them have served only a very limited
subset of newsgroups, and mail only to "registered", anonymous users. One
quite successful attempt at solving this problem was the server running at
godiva.nectar.cs.cmu.edu, written and operated by Karl Kleinpaste
<[log in to unmask]>. Karl's software has been posted to alt.sources.
 
Due to reasons too complicated to mention here I wanted to set up an
anonymous server for the scandinavian user community. I contacted Karl, and
got a pre-release copy of his software. As the version I got relied heavily
on the advanced features of MMDFII, I had to modify it quite a bit. While
hacking around, I removed the restriction of only supporting selected
newsgroups. Within a week of startup, the server had been discovered by
transatlantic users, and more recent stats show european users are definitely
a minority.
 
So what does the anon server really do? Well, it provides a front for
sending mail messages and posting news items anonymously. As you send your
very first message to the server, it automatically allocates you an id of
the form anNNN, and sends you a message containing the allocated id. This id
is used in all your subsequent anon posts/mails. Any mail messages sent to
[log in to unmask] gets redirected to your original, real address. Any
reply is of course anonymized in the same way, so the server provides a
double-blind. You will not know the true identity of any user, unless she
chooses to reveal her identity explicitly.