Several people have suggested that the remailers could send bogus messages amongst themselves in order to allow more "confusion and diffusion" of the other messages passing through the remailer network. The remailers could then batch up incoming messages fairly frequently and still have many messages in a batch. The problem with this that I see is that, looking at the remailer network as a whole, you still may have one message in and one message out a short while later. The fact that it was temporarily mixed up with a bunch of other messages doesn't help much if this message is the only one to leave the network. If the Opponent has the ability to monitor all traffic into and out of all nodes of the network (as he would have to do anyway to defeat remailers even without this cover traffic) then he will easily be able to find the messages which are not aimed at other remailers. For cover traffic to be useful, it would have to be indistinguishable from real traffic as it enters and leaves the network. So messages aimed at known "bit bucket" addresses, or at a few cooperating individuals who accept and discard incoming addresses (the same thing, really) will not help. Hal