[remailer incentives]
As you said, ecash postage could turn that around. The negative publicity part is probably the result of the general public's negative perceptions about anonymity.
not!!! I should have made this clear, but imho no matter how favorably the public sees anonymity, I still believe there will be little incentive to run remailers until there is some kind of ecash scheme. you are going to have "bad" uses of anonymity going on as long as you provide the capability. ask the remailer operators to estimate how much of their mail is simply taunts between college students or sexual harassment. I doubt you will ever be able to evade this. what cpunks might investigate is an idea of having a pseudonym server that somehow automatically registers complaints and stamps messages with known reputation levels.
People seem to forget that anyone can drop a letter into the mailbox with no return address. Did the Unabomber bring negative publicity to the postal service, causing people to demand that return addresses become a requirement? :-/
agreed, but the subject at hand was not whether anonymity is good or bad, but whether there is some incentive to run remailers.
Liability depends on the jurisdiction, doesn't it? It would be ideal if all remailers were in countries where there are no laws that would affect remailers. Reducing liability also has the added benefit of protecting anonymity, since if the mailer can't be siezed, that does prevent log files (if any) from being siezed.
by liability I am also referring to a situation in which the internet provider is pressured to quit the service by *anyone* not necessarily agents of the government. past examples are strong evidence that it does not at all require a government to shut down a remailer via pressure. anon.penet.fi at one point was pressured to shut down by "a well known net celebrity"
Remailers can already be set up _not_ to send to certain addresses, so I think there's no reason that they couldn't be set to deliver _only_ to other remailers.
hee, hee. I think you need to think that out a bit more.
Right now, I think, remailers don't need to be mainstream, they just need to be there when people need them. And I think they can become mainstream, if you consider that anon.penet.fi is quite popular.
well, the issue we were addressing is why remailers haven't proliferated like other services. it is true that the usage of them has probably gone up exponentially, or at least very significantly. but they don't seem to have multiplied in number in the same way. growth in # of remailers has been linear at best. I would be interested if any longtime remailer operators posted statistics about the amount of mail going through their services.