In a previous post I mentioned that in a remailer economy, remailer users should have the opportunity to earn pre-paid service tokens by acting as part of a remailer network. I also mentioned that this had the benefit of providing cover traffic for the remailer user's own activities. Some people pointed out that their ISP agreements forbid them to run remailers (!), and that not everyone is willing to tackle the (as yet undetermined) legal liability or risk of general legal hassle (which we've seen so far) of running a remailer. First of all, the user client should present the user who wishes to earn service tokens with the choice of registering as a terminal or non-terminal remailer link. People get paid more to be terminal links, since that's the person who is most likely to get hassled. Second of all, most of the attacks on remailers, as well as any ISP technique for detecting them, are based on some remailer's use of SMTP which is a logged service operating on a known port. This would be avoided by coevolving Mixmaster with "remailing bandwidth and reputation" servers (spiritual descendents of Raphe's remailer pinging service). Something which is taking a small step in this direction is the WWW front end to remailers available at c2.org as: http://www.c2.org:80/remail/by-www.html. Note that it has lots of security problems, but it has interesting conceptual aspects (it is also extremely easy to use.) Note that if one were using Java, one could fetch the application via Netscape, and run it within an HTML document in a Netscape window, but the sending of the mail could be done using any appropriate network port or protocol without routing back through the server where the document came from -- the applet would just open socket(s) as appropriate and go for it. (Depending on the user's security settings, a variety of "is it ok for this applet to do such-and-so" messages may be displayed.) My gut feeling is that serious remailer users and operators will ultimately want a standalone application (which can still be written in Java, and share code with the applet version), but that's a religious war we don't need to get into again.