At 3:43 PM 02/06/95, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
I'd say that it would work far better if things were changed to MIME formats. You would send a message by recursively encapsulating your message to be remailed inside a MIME message. Simple and clean...
Well... perhaps for a future remailer standard. I think the purpose of an RFC at this point is to clearly outline how it is that present remailers work, and standardize the working somewhat, and provide a document for people writing new remailers to look at to make sure their remailers work like everyone elses (or are a superset of the "Standard Type 1 Remailer" functions, a superset which certainly could include MIME or anything else). The point is to accurately describe how most remailers work now, rather then propose a major change in the way most remailers work. The latter has a place, but the former seems more pressing, as well as easier to do, and perhaps a first step to the latter. Changing "Request-Remailing-To:" to "Anon-Send-To:" is trivial, in that it would be an incredibly minor code change, and in that some remailers already implement "Anon-Send-To:". But changing everything to MIME would not be so trivial, and if we published a "standard" that said to do it with MIME, we'd end up with a standard that in fact no one follows, that doesn't accurately describe the way things are. The remailers are definitely evolving, and it's been mentioned that it might be a good idea to have a Type 1 Remailer standards document, and a Type 2 Remailer standards document, etc. But it seems of primary importance to first publish a standard of how the remailers _are_ (Type 1 remailer), instead of how we might wish they could be. (Type 1 remailer with MIME, Type 2 remailer, whatever). As for the idea of using MIME headers in itself, I'm a bit concerned that it might make it overly complicated to put together a to-be-remailed message by hand. I'm not entirely familiar with MIME and recursive encapsulation of MIME, so my concern might be ungrounded. But I think it might be a Good Thing that it's easy to remail a message by hand by adding a simple "::\nAnon-Send-To:" at the top, and it would be a mistake to make it more complicated or dificult to do this by hand, unless it's really neccesary for some reason.