Protecting your Privacy in Usenet Support Groups - Part 2
| Leonard Holmes, Ph.D. http://mentalhealth.about.com |
In an earlier article I discussed the uses of Usenet Newsgroups as online support groups. In part one of this article I wrote about some simple ways to post to newsgroups with some privacy. Until recently it was relatively easy to post anonymously to newsgroups. You could simply email your post to an address in Finland with instructions regarding which group to post to. A court forced the owner to reveal the identity of one user, and before too long the service shut down.
So what can you do now?
In addition to the simple solution already discussed, there are more complicated ways to accomplish this. Software has been written to allow you to post to these newsgroups anonymously, but it is not as simple as the extinct Finnish solution. You need to use a combination of
- an anonymous remailer (software which sends email anonymously) and
- a mail-to-newsgroup service. This allows you to post to a newsgroup without revealing your true name and email address. People can't reply personally, though, but they can reply in a manner which posts to the entire group. This is a more common way to reply in newsgroups anyway.
There are several anonymous remailers available on the web. There is a lot of information available at Galacticus' site in The Netherlands. A Java-based site in Australia allows anonymous email, but apparently not newsgroup posting. It may not work with newer browsers, and it may be illegal within the U.S. MyEmail.NET is a similar (but insecure) site.
M.I.T. offers a mail-to-news gateway which is relatively easy to use. For complete instructions you can "finger" mailtonews@anon.lcs.mit.edu, or you can send email to that address with the subject "help". The instructions are fairly clear, but not simple. An excerpt appears below:
To post an article to usenet, mail it to mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu. You must specify the newsgroup(s) to which you want to post with a "Newsgroups:" header in your mail message. When posting to multiple groups, place all newsgroups in the same "Newsgroups:" header line, separated by commas (but NO spaces). For example, to post a message to alt.test and misc.test, place the following line in your mail header: Newsgroups: alt.test,misc.test
Note that this service does NOT anonymize the news articles it posts. The address from which an article is mailed will become the return address of the posted news article.
ENCODING NEWSGROUPS IN THE ADDRESS:
If you cannot figure out a way to
add a Newsgroups header to your mail messages, you can instead include the list of
newsgroups to which you wish to post in the mail2news E-mail address. To post to group
alt.test, for instance, you can send mail to:
mail2news-YYYYMMDD-alt.test@anon.lcs.mit.edu
where YYYYMMDD is the current date (year, month, day). To post to multiple groups, you can
separate them with "+" characters. For instance, to post to alt.test and
misc.test, send mail to:<mail2news-YYYYMMDD-alt.test+misc.test@anon.lcs.mit.edu>
AVOIDING SPAM:
If you post a usenet article from
a replyable E-mail address, you will very likely end up receiving a great deal of
unsolicited commercial E-mail. To avoid this, you can instead mail your articles to: mail2news_nospam@anon.lcs.mit.edu
or
mail2news_nospam-alt.test@anon.lcs.mit.edu
which mangle you From header so as to foil automated address cullers while still
permitting humans to figure out your E-mail address.
(excerpted from
finger:mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu,
1997)
This method requires that you use these two tools together to post anonymously. Use an anonymous remailer to compose your message, and then send the message to the mail2news service at MIT. Note that the "Avoiding Spam" tools can be used without using an anonymous remailer. Confused? Me too. But the system does work. If you post regularly to support groups, these techniques may help the process.
Some newer web2news services claim to include built-in anonymity. For more information see the Anonymous Mail2News site.
Read the Anonymous remailer FAQ for detailed information on "pseudo-anonymous remailers" and anonymous remailers. The difference? Pseudo-anonymous remailers allow a few people (who run the service) to know your true email address. Law enforcement has pressured such people to reveal the identity of at least one person in recent years. They are much easier to use, however, and are adequate for most purposes.
| Leonard Holmes, Ph.D. http://mentalhealth.about.com |
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