Bill Stewart
At 06:46 PM 3/28/97 EST, Dimitri wrote:
That's a good idea, but it'll take up a lot of disk space at the machine running the remailer. Right now, remailers that provide latency don't keep an e-mail for more than about 12 hours. Once you start keeping them around for a few days (a reasonable grace period for a first-time user), it's a lot more disk space.
Typical remailers carry maybe 100-500 messages/day; typical messages run 1-20KB unless they're pictures or warez. (Yes, I'm making these numbers up....)
Let them send pictures and warez. A remailer operator shoudn't care. :-)
IMO, the 'net has changed from what it used to be a few years ago. One can no longer send e-mail to an unknown recipient and hope that they're willing to accept anonymous e-mail. I'd agree, but from the first anonymous remailers open to the public there were people who didn't like receiving anonymous mail :-)
Well... Let me quote the complaint that Jim Ray (himself a one-time
remailer operator) sent to postmaster@dm.com because he didn't like
the anonymous messages that he thought might be coming from me:
]Received: from miafl2-16.gate.net (miafl2-16.gate.net [199.227.2.143]) by osceola.gate.net (8.7.6/8.6.12) with SMTP id HAA187758; Wed, 16 Oct 1996 07:13:05 -0400
]Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 07:13:05 -0400
]Message-Id: <199610161113.HAA187758@osceola.gate.net>
]From: Jim Ray
unless the remailer knows that the recipient took some positive action to indicate that s/he has a clue (such as, added a key to a keyserver), their anon mail should be immediately discarded and they should instead get a note:
That's an interesting approach - a bit extreme, but the main cypherpunks applications for anonymous remailers are things like whistleblowing (which can be posted to the net or emailed to people like Foo Inspectors who _ought_ to be willing to accept anonymous mail) and potential co-conspirators (who _ought_ to be willing to accept it if they're interested in co-conspiring), and of course yourself under various aliases.
If the maintenance of destination blocking/unblocking is divorced from the remailer operators, then the whistleblower might be able to find out whether the recipient accepts anon e-mail. Under the scheme I sort of proposed, if I wanted to e-mail X, I might look up via the key servers whether X accepts anon e-mail. If he doesn't, I ping him, knowing that my ping will be discarded and instead he'll get a form letter telling him how to enable receipt. I can check (say) the key servers a few days later and see if he's ready to recieve anon e-mail; then I send the real message. Another advantage: there's no need to put the remailer's real address in the form line. Right now most operators say something like "e-mail foo@bar and/or remailer-operators to be dest-blocked". Under the scheme I'm not quite proposing yet, you can put any junk in the from: (it's irrelevant!) and put the instructions for dest-blocking via a 3rd party in a comment header. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps