Tools/Stats manager...
Introduction
In order for mixmaster to perform reliably, it's necessary for you to have up-to-date reliability statistics and keyrings. Before mix chooses the remailers for your chain, it always loads it's statistics page from disk to decide what remailers are safe to use. Once a safe chain of remailers is chosen, mix loads the cryptographic keys provided by each remail and creates the multi-encrypted packet that is then sent from your computer to the first remailer in the chain. I can't emphasise enough--current reliability statistics and cryptographic keys are absolutely necessary. If the stats are out of date or key(s) expired, your mail may not be delivered.
The QS Stats Manager provides for both automatic and manual updates. In the Options Dialog, Mix Tab, you'll find a selector for how often you wish to auto-update the required pages. You need to update these at least once every day you use QS. You can choose to update once a day or before every send. Also, you'll notice the checkbox that allows you to turn off auto-updating completely. Under normal circumstances, you'll never turn off auto-update completely. It is possible that you may be force to turn this off temporarily until some problem is resolved. In this case, it's important you solve the problem and get auto-updates turned back on ASAP. The success or failure of your message's delivery is at stake. In the stats manager, You'll find an Update button which you can use at any time to do a manual update.
In the Options Dialog youl'll also find a series of checkboxes for the various pages mixmaster can use. These allow you to select which pages will be updated.
mlist.txt
This page contains the vital reliabiity statistics for remailers in the mixmaster network. It provides info on the remailer history over the last 12 days, an estimation of how long the remailer has been holding messages before sending them on, and each remailers uptime expressed as a percent value. It also contains info on what remailer chains aren't working. That is to say, for unknown reasons, mail from remailer A to remailer B never arrives. This info is important to mixmaster so it won't be choosing remailer A followed by B in your chain. It's important you be familiar with the layout of this report and the info contained. One day you'll recieve an error when you update and only a basic knowledge of what's going on will help you out.
Here's an example mlist.txt.
pubring.mix
A second page of equal importance is the mixmaster keyring, pubring.mix. This page contains the cryptographic keys of all the remailers listed in mlist.txt. Mix uses these keys to created the multi-encrypted packet that leaves your computer. It is critically important this page be fresh at the time you send mixmaster mail. These keys expire periodically and the remailers issue new ones. Each remailer's schedule for this change is individual and these changes can happen at any time. I highly recommend that you update pubring.mix each time you update mlist.txt. It only takes a second. If your pubring.mix contains expired keys, mail through those remailers will be discarded.
Here's an example pubring.mix.
rlist.txt
This page is used to check the size of your message against the max size allowed by various remailers. It is actually the reliability statistics report for type I remailers. Mixmaster is a type II remailer network but rlist.txt also contains info on the maximum message size each remailer allows. QS uses the portion of the report where the lines begin with $remailer. So, we download this page for max message size info only. This needs to be updated with each mlist.txt update.
Here's an example rlist.txt.
pubring.asc
This page contains PGP keys used by type I remailers. QuickSilver is a type II client. This page is of no use and may be safely ignored. In the Options Dialog you can safely untick this page on the Mix tab.
Ok, So I've got an error. What do I do?
When you get an error, out of the blue, it's probably caused be the stats source being offline, either temporarily or forever. The easiest method of resolving the problem is to change to a different stats source. For info on that, see Changing Stats Source