From: Peter Honeyman <honey@citi.umich.edu> Date: Thu, 4 Mar 93 09:49:10 EST Date: Thu, 4 Mar 93 08:54:56 -0500 From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@Athena.MIT.EDU> And "holding somone responsible for their actions" doesn't necessarilly mean throwing someone in jail, or sueing them for lots of money --- it can be as simple as their knowing that what they say can be traced back to them, and their own personal credibility is on the line. ted, do you think today's nets offer this assurance? i certainly do not. Not completely, no. But to a certain extent, yes. It is generally much more difficult to get a new account on a (same or differemt) computer system, then it is to get a new pseudonym assigned to you by a remailer, or to generate a new public/private key pair. So if you drag your email identity through the mud, you are damaging yourself. If today's nets did not have this characteristic, why are people building remailers in the first place?!? The answer, of course, is that they do have this effect. And, of course, if someone is truely abusive --- or perhaps isn't being intentially malicious, but by accident started a mail loop of some kind, perhaps involving a buggy vacation program --- you can always send mail to the postmaster of his/her site. There are definitely controls on undesireable behavior (whether intentional or non-intentional) which get lost when you move to a remailer based system. - Ted