X-Real-Subject: Re: not assigning IDs for alt.whistleblower X-Real-From: Richard M. Nixon X-Real-Message-Body-Begin: It's probably a reasonable policy - anybody who wants to can add a signature line or equivalent giving themselves a pseudonym, and if they want private replies they can provide a PGP or RIPEM public key. A clean way to avoid the problem of encrypted replies cluttering up the newsgroup is to also create alt.whistleblower.followup or a.w.crypt, with similar non-assignment of ids, so readers can easily skip over the crypted private replies. If some whistleblower, or some whistlelistener, is more trusting, they can even post their an12345 address. I *would* recommend the following policies - - accept email in PGP, RIPEM, and also unencrypted MIME, X.400, and vanilla formats- not everybody who wants to blow a whistle has the right-shaped whistle handy. - publish an "official" method for defining what part gets posted - e.g. Anonymous-Subject: Use me instead of the main header Subject: Begin-Anonymous-Message-Body: ..... End-Anonymous-Message-Body: as part of the *text* of the message, so that people with different mailers can be sure about what parts get kept and what don't - it would be real annoying to have the signature-stripper delete the good parts of a message because they looked like signatures, or leave on the signatures because they looked like text, but some mailers won't let your do what you want with headers. Also publish a policy for messages that _don't_ contain them. A proper approach might be to use the MIME headers, but accept them from inside the message body as well as from the headers of proper MIME messages, so people can do them by hand. This has the added advantage of supporting Content-Transfer-Encoding: headers so you can tell more easily which encryption was used, and so senders of unencrypted messages can use compression or rot13 :-) to avoid having their message sent in obvious ascii. X-Real-Signature: "Maybe I _was_ a crook" X-Real-Message-Body-End: Bill # Bill Stewart wcs@anchor.ho.att.com +1-908-949-0705 Fax-4876 # AT&T Bell Labs, Room 4M-312, Crawfords Corner Rd, Holmdel, NJ 07733-3030