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Monty Cantsin wrote:
- Everyone a remailer. Remailers only accept messages from other remailers. To use remailers you must run a remailer.
I don't grow my own wheat, grind it up, and then make my own bread. I also prefer not to run a remailer.
You don't have to. You pay someone to bake your bread for you, and you can pay someone to run your remailer for you. This idea has been around since remailers began. The basic premise is that a group of remailers are set up which only accept mail from other remailers. A pinging system can be set up to verify that all the remailers are operating correctly. The catch is that in practice each remailer is only required to accept mail from other remailers, but can actually accept mail from anybody the operator wants to. So if you don't want to run a remailer, just pay someone to run a remailer on your behalf, and then you can send anonymous messages through that person's site. Thus forwarding within the remailer network is free, but it costs money to insert new messages. This scheme is a little more flexible than attaching ecash to each message because you can arrange any type of fee schedule you like, such as a flat rate per month. There's also the reverse of this, where remailers accept from anyone, but only send to other remailers. Thus you have to pay to get your messages out of the remailer network. This is more restrictive because the payment must be anonymous.
- Pay for access to an anonymous message pool
Interesting!
Sign up with an ISP that offers alt.anonymous.messages. This one is a no-brainer. (and profitable for the ISP) This results in a system where sending messages is essentially free (since free remailers exist) but it costs money to receive them. So far it seems to be successful, at least for those who pay a flat fee for usenet access.