Hiya, One of the newsgroups I was reading have this persistant "tester" who uses the anon service in Finland. Anyway, there were several different postings, all with different ids, but same kinds of "this is a test, nyah nyah" contents. As I was one of those "stop it" people, and seeing more of the same bullshit by that guy, I got slightly pissed off, and started thinking. Already that person is using about 3 different anonymous ids. If he is introduced to the remailers here, conceivably he could generate more anonymous ids for himself (ie, kill files won't work then, unless you want to kill a whole site) by routing his mail thru the remailers. Each remailer would give him another userid at that anon service. And if he uses it to loop back to the remailers... And then loop to that Australian anon service... and so on. He could "legitimately" have a hundred or so different anon_ids, from one original userid. What if someone who realises this was to use that capability to post some really "colorful" material to news? Suddenly you have a hundred or so weirdos posting "I want nude pictures of a gerbil, please" to alt.binaries. pictures.erotica... you get the idea. Is there anyway to stop this from happening? And this is on top of the real weirdos (ie, those who know how to post anonymously, like most of the readers of this list... :)) So far, the net has functioned as it's own sieve with regards to the "weirdos" but if the remailers is generally available (as it should be!), the potential for abuse is much much greater. Any way to slow it down? "Hey, look, a flame war, let's join in..." Of course, if someone was to forge a mail to the anon service... don't even need to know about the remailers... but with forged mail, the anon service can at least "check" to see the validity of your address. I realise that this is probably not important in the overall scheme of things... but I am curious about what can be done to reduce such potential abuse. Ciao. -Tai ps: Any tips on tracing anonymous mail and newspostings? I mean beyond the "from" and "path" things... ie, trace to the userid... Someone tried to forge a posting in my name... (yes, that's what got me thinking :))