No longer maintained

Note that I give up maintaining this project. If you want to take it over, contact me at my sf.net mail address.

alt.anonymous.messages fetcher (aamFetch)

Introduction

aamFetch is a utility to download anonymous nym messages from alt.anonymous.messages. It supports esub headers and random download of foreign messages (to increase your anonymity). You can find a more detailed description below. However, if the terms "nymserver", "anonymous remailer", "esub" and "alt.anonymous.messages" are unfamiliar for you, you most probably won't need this tool...

Download

aamFetch requires a Java Runtime Environment (Standard Edition, 1.4 or higher). If you do not have it yet, download it for free from java.sun.com.

It also requires the bouncycastle crypto provider libraries for decryption of esub subjects - however, if you use a binary package, you do not have to download them, since they are included. If you want to build aamFetch from source, you can download them from the bouncycastle website.

Binary download (Version 0.9.1, 870 KB)

Source download (Version 0.9.1, 31 KB)

NOTE: I accidentally compiled aamfetch 0.9.1 with Java5 optimizations, so if you want to run it on Java 1.4, you'll either have to compile it yourself, or use this jar file instead of the original one.

NEW: Download Patch for hsub support (Description)

Sourceforge project page

is located here.

CVS

You can also get the latest "bleeding edge" source code from CVS.

Browse it or use the following commands to check it out anonymously:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@aamfetch.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/aamfetch login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@aamfetch.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/aamfetch co aamfetch

Description

Sometimes you get into situations where it is helpful to write someone an "anonymous" message and still be able to get replies. Depending on your "threat model", it might be enought to create an e-mail account at a freemailer for that purpose. But some people have a bit more anonymous needs (or are just to paranoid the freemailer will give their details away...). For that purpose there are some so called "nym servers" available. One can send anonymous mails to them (by using, e. g., the mixmaster remailer network) and get a repliable mail address where mails sent to it will be posted to the alt.anonmyous.messages newsgroup. (I know, you can use nym servers to send mails back to your mail address via reply blocks as well, but that scenario is not important here since aamFetch won't help you in those cases). The content will be sent encrypted (both with your PGP key and with a passphrase) and have a subject chosen by you. However, the subject can be constant but it does not need to. You can also use "encrypted subjects" - i.e. your subject will be encrypted with a cipher feedback algorithm which will bear a new ciphertext for every message. Only someone who knows the key (also known as the "Encrypt-Subject" or short "esub") can see all those messages belong together. Especially if you use this feature, you are out of luck if you want to use your favourite news reader for fetching your messages. Further more, if your news reader allows to filter your messages, it might be possible for an attacker (sitting at your NNTP server) to notice which messages you downloaded, and - even worse - which messages belong together (since some newsreaders will apply the filters sequentially, so all messages matching the first filter will be downloaded "en bloc"). aamFetch can help you here. You can specify as many Subjects and Subject/ESub combinations as you like. Additionally you can specify to download (and discard) all other messages as well - so that your nntp server admin cannot know *anything* about what messages are for you. Or - if that is too much traffic for you - you can limit foreign messages by size (Caution: If an attacker sends a really large message for *you*, this might compromise your anonmyity if you download it and no other large messages!) or you can download only say 50% of the messages (randomly chosen). This will use a SHA1 PRNG algorithm for the randomness. Since there are lots of options to set up, there is a simple and an advanced config interface available - just to meet everyone's needs. Messages will be stored in .mbox format to simplify importing them into your e-mail program. For those who don't have a mbox-capable e-mail program, there is also a simple mbox viewer included.

More information can be found in the manual.

Contact me

You can contact me by (anonymous) mail at my sourceforge e-mail address.

Have fun!

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