Pseudo An Anonymous Email Relay Server

Modern secure email protocol relies on PGP encryption to ensure privacy. However, while PGP can confirm message body authenticity and privacy, it fails to provide anonymity. This is because it leaves all identifying headers of an email such as IP and email addresses in plain text. As a result, users are often left vulnerable when communicating with compromised machines. We propose Pseudo, an SMTP relay server capable of stripping identifying information from emails as a solution to improving anonymity when sending emails. Pseudo is intended to be an extra layer of security used on top of PGP to assure not only privacy, but also anonymity. This paper discusses Pseudo’s implementation, how it can securely maintain persistent anonymity between two communicating parties, and the shortcomings our implementation faces. A working programmatic implementation can be found at https://github.com/sdrobs/Pseudo.