Taking the time to sit down and thoroughly read the Beginner's Guide and User's Manual will pay off and will improve your security.

• My message was lost
  
• No response from Nym-Server
  
• Nym-Server reports bad signature
  
• Decryption problems and clearsigned messages
  
• Message creation hangs
  
• No return address specified
  
• Not logged into server
  
• Not connected
  
• This program has performed an illegal operation...
  
• File permissions error
  
• Remailers missing from book list
  
• Message is MIME encoded
  

Please review the Beginner's Guide for a list of the causes of lost mail and news posts. This problem is most commonly caused by out of service remailers or problematic remailer combinations.

Before attempting to create a nym account, practice sending anonymous mail. If you can't send anonymous mail with reasonable success, you won't be able to use a nym account successfully.

Nym-servers are generally reliable, but it is not unusual to experience lost mail due to remailer problems. If you don't hear from the nym-server, most likely either your request was lost and never reached it, or its reply to you was lost. Recreate and send the request once per day, using different remailers, until you get a response. (Just edit the remailers in your Nym Book and press Create again.) If you still receive no reply, try creating a test account with a simpler and more reliable reply-block chain. (See Quick Nym.NBK in your Nyms folder.)

If you received the confirmation request, sent an anonymous reply to the specified address, and received no reply, then the nym-server may have not received it or its reply was lost. Try sending to the confirm address again through a different set of remailers. If there is still no response, one of the remailers in your reply-block may be dropping messages. Try sending your nym account some anonymous mail and see if you receive it. If not, resubmit your reply-block using different remailers by updating your Nym Book and running it again.

Don't submit reply-blocks in rapid succession, or the reply-blocks may be overwritten before they can be confirmed. Submit a reply-block about once per day, depending on the latency of the remailers you're using.

If you are creating a new account and the nym-server responds that your signature is invalid, this usually means that the account address you attempted to create is already in use. Try another username.

You might also have signed with an incompatible key or version of PGP. Current nym-servers require RSA keys 2048 bits or less.

If you experience problems decrypting a message and would like to see each stage of decryption, select Window|View Mail|Tools|Decrypt|Diagnostic Mode, select the message, right-click, and select Decrypt. When Diagnostic Mode is enabled, JBN will display each layer as it is decrypted, and will display the keys or passphrases used at each stage.

If using PGP 2.6.x and you receive a clearsigned message with encryption within it, JBN will not check the signature but will decrypt the inner messages. After this is done, the signature will no longer be valid. To see the original text and signature, enable Diagnostic Mode and when the appropriate stage is displayed, select the text and copy it to the clipboard (press Ctrl-C).

Normally JBN will check the signature and remove it from the message when used with PGP 5 or 6. The above method may also be used to archive the original message with signature intact.

If you have just installed PGP 2.6.x, note that the very first time PGP is run it requires random keyboard input from the user. Set Window|Global Config|DOS Mode to Window Paused and run the message. After a successful run, set the DOS Mode back to Hide.

If you receive a "No return address specified" error when attempting to send mail, this indicates that JBN is having problems communicating properly with your SMTP server. This can be caused by an invalid SMTP From Address (some ISPs require that you use your real email address on outgoing mail). It can also be caused by an incorrectly configured firewall, or an SMTP server which is improperly configured or blocking you from sending mail.

Try sending mail through a different SMTP server to see where the problem lies.

If you receive this message (during POP3 retrieval) it means that either your password or login name is incorrect, the POP3 server is down, or the server is not compatible with JBN2. Secure Password Authentication (used by MSN for example) and non-standard mail accounts (AOL) are not supported. You can use a free POP3 account to work around this problem.

If you are not using a dialup modem to connect to the internet (you are using a cable modem, LAN, etc.) you should disable Options|Verify Connection. This causes JBN to assume you are always connected.

Page fault crashes in SPGP.DLL and KERNEL32.DLL which produce the above message in Windows9x will cause JBN2 to shut down prematurely. This is due to an unresolved problem in the SPGP.DLL component, which JBN2 uses to access PGP 5 and 6. This component has problems with some versions of PGP, particularly 6.5.x. For more information please consult the Known Problems page.

JBN cannot update your keyring if another program, such as PGPKeys, has the keyring files open.

If Mixmaster remailers appear in the Stats Browser but aren't available in the drop-down list of choices in Message Books, this indicates you do not have the Mix keys for those remailers. Select Tools|Get Mix Keys, or send a message directly to the remailer with the Subject: remailer-key

If a Cypherpunk remailer is missing from your stats list but you wish to use it, you may manually add the remailer's capability string in Window|Remailers Config|Capabilities. You might also look for a more up-to-date stats source.

If your message contains extended characters used in some languages, it contains binary content. Because binary mail can cause problems in older mail servers, it must be encoded with either MIME Quoted-Printable (QP) or 8 bit encoding. By default JBN uses QP encoding. You may specify that 8 bit encoding be used in the Options menu of the Message Book. However you should be aware that some mail systems will not accept 8 bit encoded binary mail. Most mail2news servers do accept 8 bit encoding.