There are hundreds of machines littered around the net that dont bother adding "received" headers to mail. I dont think that these provide anything near the security and anonymity that a single remailer (much less a remailing chain) provide, but it seems to me that routing outbound traffic from a remailer through one of these sites would provide at least /some/ measure of protection for the remailer-operator. It feels a bit underhanded, but it may be that involving some "innocent" bystanders in the remail process would be useful. Even if the sites being routed through /were/ keeping logs it would still require their participation in any investigation to discover where the mail had originated, and this would introduce the question of whether the (psuedo)anonymous sendmail host should bear any liability for not tracking where mail came from. The operator of the particular smtp host would seem to have a pretty good defense should a charge be raised, but in defending the smtp-host you could also be strengthening the defense of the r-ops. Another possibility is that rather than operating remailers at all, maybe we should be operating non-logging smtp hosts that dont add received headers. Building a client to take advantage of these servers would be trivial (i wrote one last night, and i am not proficient in C) and it could be argued that the situation was not created intentionally to allow anonymous messages, merely to preserve disk space and bandwidth. Flame Away...