I'm in the process of working on some perl scripts to implement a fully anonmous mailing list. I mentioned interest in this a month or so ago on cypherpunks, but i think it might have been during some of the list troubles, so many might have missed it. At any rate, I have very little unix programming experience, but since no one else seemed to be working on an anon mailing list, although sev eral people said they had given it some thought, I figured I might as well give it a try. The basic idea is simply that anon-remailers will be used, so that the mailing list doesn't need anyone's real address; it can send list mail to them through the anon remailers using encrypted re-send to blocks. Additionally, the list would send out all mail pgp-encrypted with the individual keys of list members. (yes, this could be proccesor-time-consuming). And incoming mail would be required to be encrypted to the list, and signed by a list member. And PGP-signature-checking would be used for authentication of unsubcribe commands, and such. Possibly, remote list maintanance with signature-checking for authentication might be coded. Anyhow, I'm not sure whether I should attempt to modify some existing mailing list code, or just write my own from scratch (which seems like it actually might be easier). But I could try to modify majordomo, or more likely SmartList. SmartList is some scripts and recipe files for procmail to implement a mailing list. procmail is a incoming mail proccessing program. I want to make sure this stuff can be run from inside a normal user account, if neccesary, which is easy to do with SmartList. I'm not familiar with the inner workings of majordomo. The reason I'd modify preexisting stuff is because they are already set up to deal with rather obscure possible errors in rather complicated ways that I might not want to duplicate myself. But I'm not sure how significant this is, and I'd really rather write it from scratch myself, and not have to deal with puzzling through someone elses code. (Yeah, I'm lazy). What do you all think? I've put in a little bit of meta-level effort in writing it from scratch. I've come accross DMB databases as a way of keeping the records of members pseudonyms, anon-remailer address blocks, and anon-remailer addresses. Is this a good idea? The documentation I saw on DBM databases suggested that there might be a unpredicable size limitaton of 1000 bytes or so, which could conceivably become prohibitive with especially long encrypted remailer address blocks. But I don't know of any other easy way to maintain such a database. I'm _not_ going to write my own database maintanance code; I wouldn't know where to begin. Any suggestions? I'd appreciate any input people have for me.