Ben Holiday <ncognito@gate.net> wrote:

After pondering a bit it seems to me that the "knock knock" remailer approach (only send anon-mail if the recipient agrees to receive it) could be made feasable pretty easily.

Rather than hold the mail while waiting for a consent to release, you could simply encrypt the peice of mail with a symetric algorythm on its final hop, and send the encrypted mail to the recipient.

At this point there are 2 options, which I havnt examined closely: The first is that you require them to send a request for their "consent-code" which can be used to decrypt the mail. Under this arrangment you could possibly provide for a user to specify a specific consent code, so that 2 party's who had previously agreed to communicate could avoid "knocking". If you strip the subject, then it would be all but impossible for a person to include the consent code in the actual peice of mail.

This could be done with no "storage" as well, by a slightly different method and still require end reciepient acknowledgement. The end reciepient could be required to reply and include the encrypted message. The remailer would then decrypt the message and send back the plaintext. Only storage would be the key vs. a message id database.

The second is to simply include the consent-code along with the encrypted peice of mail and a legal notice stating that decryption of the mail constitutes your consent to receive the mail, as well as your agreement to hold the remailer-operator harmless should the mail be found to be in some way offensive. Further, the recipient would agree to be solely liable for the contents of the mail, etc etc.. I leave the actual agreement to the net.lawyers to figure out.

By reduction - you could just do a rot13 on the message and append the "legal notice". If all the information for decoding a message is present in that message, is a different encoding mechanism really any different from straight ASCII text? (i.e. Netscape 9.13 might have auto decoding built it....) Then, the user doesn't do anything "extra" - does this invalidate the notice? I might be wrong, but I don't think that this second method would gain you anything in the 2 situations where operators will get hassled. 1) Posting of copyrighted material - the lawyers will at least harass you no matter what kind of legal notice is up front. 2) Mailing of "harassing" information - the person still gets unwanted email, and has no way to stop it.

[... legal ideas deleted ...]

Heaven forbid that I use spammers as an idea base, but to borrow something from them.... Set up the headers on an anonymous message such that a Reply would result in the user automatically being placed on the "deny" list. This means that only 1 message gets through.... but, as Hal has noted, that might be 1 message too many. Similarily, a message sent to the user could be the "knock", and then a reply would automatically add the user to the "allow" list as well as forward the message.... just an automatination of the "knock" idea. Dan ------------------------------------------------------------------ Dan Oelke Alcatel Network Systems droelke@aud.alcatel.com Richardson, TX