I'm not sure how big of a problem this is. A remailer which was there 3 or 4 days ago is _probably_ still going to be around. The software can look at the date on the article, and ignore articles that took an enormous amount of time to get there, like say 2 weeks or something. But I think 3 or 4 days might be acceptable. What do you think?
It is certainly better than anything we have now. One nice thing about your idea is that it can be brought online in steps. It doesn't require all remailers to suddenly switch over to using alt.anonremailer.net.
I'm not sure what you mean by "ping".
Any of the "ping" mechanisms you mentioned would work (some better than others). There's no need to limit the "ping" to a single mechanism. The "I am here" messages could have a field indicating the different "ping" mechanisms the remailer supports. Again, this could start out to by a NULL field, and could be added to incrementally, as remailers get more sophisticated. Jim_Miller@suite.com