Just to give some kudos to Raph, I've used his "finger" service and have been shocked at how _good_ it is! Seeing the uptimes, delays, etc. is very useful in planning remailer chains.
I haven't had the time to explore his other tools, though.
'premail' is excellent. I just this weekend hacked elm and pine to worrrk with premail, which I posted to the list. (these versions of elm and pine are installed on c2.org -- premail is not yet publically installed.)
Between this pinging service, and those of Matt Ghio and Sameer Parekh (haven't checked it in a while), welcome progress has been made.
My pinger (on remail@c2.org and remailer@csua.berkeley.edu) has not been very reliable. I wanted a remailer pinger service available for my blind server and client projects and having seen Raph's setup I am deferring to his. . I hope to be able to incorporate the excellent setup that Raph is running into a client for the blind server running on omega.c2.org. Regarding Tim's earlier comments about for-pay remailers and such. I regard remail@c2.org a for-pay/prfossionally run remailer. While there is no charge associated with using the remailer, it is running as one of the many services offered by the for-profit Community ConneXion system. Thus I hope to keep this remailer very reliable, very strong, and Raph's setup will hopefully show this. (The blind server is an actual for-pay service but I expect that most users will not use it to a degree more than they get for free when they set up an account -- I should make sure I reword my description to emphasize that. [I suspect the reason thhat not many people have signed up [the client *is* hard to use, yes, and slightly buggy, but it works.. that is a reason, but not the main one, in my eyes is that people see that it is a forpay service and don't realize that light usage is free]) -- sameer Voice: 510-841-2014 Network Administrator Pager: 510-321-1014 Community ConneXion: The NEXUS-Berkeley Dialin: 510-549-1383 http://www.c2.org (or login as "guest") sameer@c2.org