One of the purposes of setting up remailers is to experiment with them, see what kind of emergent behavior appears, see what kind of flaws and obstacles arise, see how they break, etc. Here's one: the compromise of my "anonymity" by one of the folks running a remailer. (Who and where don't matter, just the phenomenon itself.) I used a single bounce without any encryption to send a message and got a query from the owner of the remailer saying "I couldn't help looking through my remailer archives and noticing...." and requesting more information from me!! Hoist by my own petard! Several lessons: * Multiple bounces help, even without encryption, as then the remailer sysop can't be sure who originated the message. * Encryption is of course even more desirable, though a hassle (especially for Mac users). * Remailer sysops should make a point to _not_ look at their remailer archives. In fact, they should discard them immediately (for their own legal protection, and for slightly greater trust amongst users, though this is a hazy area...). (Recall that the "mix" on which our software-based remailers are loosely patterned are "memoryless," i.e., the tamper-resistant modules that implement the receive-decrypt-store-forward protocol have no memory of the mapping between incoming and outgoing messages. In fact, the outside world cannot possibly compromise the protocols to get at this information.) So, my laziness in using only a single bounce, combined with the curiosity of a remailer sysop, breaks the anonymity. Neither surprising nor profound, but I thought you folks would like to know. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: by arrangement.