On Sat, 15 Dec 2001, Anonymous wrote:

Lucky Green writes:

...

A popular remailer will handle some 3,500 messages a day. But this includes intra remailer-network traffic. How many of those messages are messages entering and leaving the cloud is any remailer operator's guess, since current remailer statistics software has no means to differentiate between internal and boundary traffic. Of course any self-respecting TLA would know the those figures that the remail operators themselves are currently unable to obtain.

It's a myth that remailers don't distinguish between inter-remailer and outside traffic. Actually, remailers generally have built-in knowledge of every other remailer, and mail from them is handled specially.

[...] I think what Lucky means is that the remailer operators have no way of knowing if the messages passing between remailers are actual messages, dummy traffic, stats pings, etc. All that a remailer can tell is the number of real messages entering or leaving his server (and even this would require modification to the remailer software). Unless all the remailer operators collected and shared this information, we can't know accurate stats for the remailer network as a whole. How much are dummy messages that come from one remailer and die at the last remailer? How much are pings that return to the originating remailer/stats collector? These aren't helpful if you are a remailer user wishing to hide in the crowd -- you need lots of other remailer users generating traffic.