The idea is a very good one, its usually called "link encryption." The idea is to make it difficult to tell when someone is using a line by filling that line with random noise that looks like encrypted data. Making a remailer do this is an interesting idea. Perhaps a subscription facility, so you can ask a remailer to send you X messages per day, with X higher than your anticipated traffic? Alternately, you could get roughly X messages per day, so a small overflow wouldn't show up at once. Adam | "Subway" remailers would exchange identical sized "containers", much | like a subway at semi-regular pulses or intervals. It would require | a ring of remailers large enough (yeah, I know) to make traffic analysis | of entrance and exit points difficult and/or expensive. -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume