It seems that an anonymous remailer can operate in one of three ways - it can reveal your psuedonym, it can reveal your identity, or it can reveal nothing and simply give you a generaic "anonymous" identity.
There is one more option - use two separate sets of anon id's. This is the way anon.penet.fi Mk II is going to operate.
- If it simply strips out all identifying information and calls you some generic anonymous name, this could lead to problems for people who expect a reply to their messages.
Yeah. This problem is solved by the aforementioned "double" id approach...
I think the best solution is to require any message sent through a remailer to include explicit instructions as to how it should be handled. For example , require something like an "X-Identify:" field that would be used to select th e return address behavior, with options like "real-id", "psuedonym", or "anonymous". Messages that don't include the field should bounce, probably with some instructions as to how to fix the message to make it go through properly.
No way. 75% of my users just can't deal with the extra headers. I frequently get messages like: "Dear Sir. I not understand you help. I not read English. I chinese. Send chinese help." Julf