3umoelle@informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Ulf =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6ller?=) wrote:
How are messages selected? It seems that the recipient needs to know the message IDs of all messages in the system, and must have a way to identify his messages.
Yes. Message-IDs on usenet average around 30-35 bytes each, so for a typical remailer one might have to download 1000 Message-IDs, which would take about 32K, not much bigger than the message itself. You could also use MD5 hashes of the messages, in which case a list of 1000 message-IDs would take only 16K. (In the unlikely event of a hash collision you could download those two messages seperately. Unless the number of messages was huge (millions), you could probably get away with using only a 32 or 64-bit hash function.)