I was under the impression that remailers already allowed for multiple messages with separate destinations to be batched in one message with appropriate embedded demarcation headings. How about if a remailer reordered incoming messages, batched groups of messages, and sent the batches to different remailers for chaining? That would achieve the effects on traffic analysis without multiplying traffic. If you want to keep chaining strictly under the senders' control, the batching could be done with messages that are marked by the sender as being destined for chaining through the same remailer. But I don't like that as much. Jonathan Rochkind suggested that the remailers could signal their availability via posts to a special alt newsgroup. I think it would be easier and more reliable if instead the remailers contacted each other directly in some way to check for availabity. Perhaps they could listen on some port, perhaps a finger daemon, anything that would let one remailer ask another for some sort of status check. Automated chaining between mailers that confirm availabilty before passing on messages would be more reliable than a user choosing the entire chaining path before mailing off the message. And it would allow the chained messages to be reordered and batched. -- sidney <sidney@apple.com>