Derek's further comments about some kind of receipt that comes back....I'll have to think about that further. My hunch is that that may break the total anonymity (that we strive for as a principle) and should be avoided. I'd recommend we all go back and look at the
I'm not sure that I really meant to have a receipt, more or a return-path. Maybe even a cryptographiccally secure return path. I think a question is: who are we protecting against? Are we protecting against the remailer operators? Or are we trying to protect from a third party? I think we should go back and re-examine our goals for anonymity.
Yes, but Hal has not obligation to accept messages from known disruptors, any more than you have an obligation to "never censor" people by keeping them out of your house.
To me, this is like NEARNet saying that they have no obligation to accept packets from a known disruptive user. No, I don't believe that that is the answer. Then again, I don't think that a remailer should run out of an account, but rather on a machine, but that's a different story. I consider a remailer a service, and as such, the service should be available to all comers. (With digital postage this paradigm makes much more sense). I do not think of it like a home. I also agree that positive reputation is important, but I think that is much more difficult to implement than a more secure anonymous system. To reiterate: I do think that something needs to be done, but I think we should analyze what we are trying to accomplish rather than rushing off and saying "just don't service this abusive customer". -derek