It relies on there being at least one operator who won't reveal his logs. If one of your bounces happens to be through your own remailer, you can guarantee this.

Let's be clear on exactly how useful it is to route your messages through your own remailer. It's not as useful as it first appears. If the Awful Nasties convince all of the remailers downstream of yours to give up their logs, they trace the message back to your machine. You then might choose to say, "Hey man, it wasn't my message, it was just my remailer. And I'm not giving you the logs." But if you're going to use this excuse, you needn't really have routed your message through your remailer at all; you just need to be operating a remailer and routinely refuse to divulge its logs. -- Marc Ringuette (mnr@cs.cmu.edu)