On Sat, 9 Mar 1996, Nelson Minar wrote:

I proposed this a couple of months ago, there should be a bit of discussion left over in the archives. My idea was to have an account keyed to a password - if you emailed the server with the right password, it would take the text of your email and put it in the specified URL. Then you can use remailers to preserve anonymity with the server. It's sort of like the alias.c2.org accounts.

I have something like that (not yet finished or released). I run a mailbot which accepts mail to a unicorn.com address and allows remote updating of my WWW tree (and a lot of other things, e.g. mailing lists, multiple mailbox support, etc). It just checks the PGP signature matches the www key in my PGP keyring, and performs the update if it does. Most of the interest I've had in the release version was from people who wanted remote updates of their non-anonymous sites by email, but it could easily be used for anonymous accounts. Much more secure than just using a plaintext password (of course neither are secure if someone can log into your account, but if they can do that, they can modify your Web pages directly). Mark