(I'm also marc@mit.edu. But composing over a 9600 baud line sucks :-) I just had an idea. Assume we have some sort of workable system for anonymous return addresses. What if every message were *required* to have one, and if the remailers verified their correctness (at least as far as we can, given the fakability of net mail)? Then, if someone received harassing email, she could ask the remailer maintainers to find the real name of the sender of a piece of mail. Assuming reasonable remailer maintainers (and we can use positive reputations to decide that), they'd be able to do this. The system has a built-in safety: All the remailer maintainers would have to agree that a message was indeed harassing to the recipient before they would use their private keys to follow the chain back. Unless all the maintainers agreed to trace the message, it would be impossible, and the sender's anonymity would be assured. I'm just trying to think of technical solutions to our societal woes, as hopeless as this may be. Remember, if people were honest, we wouldn't need encryption, either. Sigh. Marc