What if people were to create virtual machines (eg Java or whatever) which were accessible to anyone on the internet, and linked them together in a virtual network. CPU-time and bandwidth on the virtual machines could then be sold (or more likely bartered). The network would be self-contained, so nobody outside the virtual network would see it. So, when one wants to send some anonymous messages, just buy or trade for some processor time and disk space somewhere, then mail in a remailer program and it'll run. When it runs out of cpu-time credits, it just gets deleted. (The machine owner would have little reason to keep it around, since it is more economically profitable to lease the disk space to someone else rather than try to decrypt old remailer traffic, which would likely be a futile effort, given enough layers of encryption) So let's say we agree I'll give you 10 mips-years of cpu and 10 MB disk space and 100 MB of network traffic on my machine, and you give me the same on your computer. I then trade some of the CPU time & disk space on your machine to Joe, who uses it to set up some remailers. Joe then sells remailer services to some newbies. After their pre-paid remailer cards run out then Joe's remailer has used up all his CPU-credits on your machine and the remailer (and the evidence) disappears. Your computer just deletes the files and you never know about Joe or his anonymous message service. Pretty good anonymity. :-) Of course, in order to prevent certain obvious harassment attacks, the virtual network would need to remain self-contained, so people would need their own virtual-network/virtual-computer clients to access their anonymous mail. They'd probably even need to sell their cpu-cycles to key crackers in order to pay for their email service. ;-)