A very interesting warning, and an interesting conceptual loophole, if I understand it correctly. What I think I understand is, that if I reply to an anonymous message, the remailer will create and maintain an anonymous ID for me, of the form "an12345", which it will use for all subsequent messages that I send through it. If so, then the gotcha is this: Suppose I am not interested in anonymity. I read a message that looks interesting, and reply to it -- both to the originator and to the newsgroup. The remailer gives me an "anonymous" ID which is promptly compromised because the same text went out both with my name on it and with the anonymous ID attached. But who cares -- as I stipulated, at the time I was not interested in anonymity, and may not even have realized that the message I was replying to was posted via an anonymous remailer. BUT suppose that six months from now I suddenly turn paranoid (or realist -- which term you choose depends on your world view), and decide I would like to use the anonymous mailer. Now I send messages to and through it, but the mailer already has an "anonymous" ID for me -- the one long since compromised -- so it keeps using it. Sounds to me like an interesting way for a user to compromise anonymity without it really being anybody's fault. I hope this problem is explained in the remailer documentation (which I haven't sent for -- at the moment I am not interested in anonymity), and that there is an easy way for a user to request a new anonymous ID. A fair fraction of the readers of this list will probably be saying "caveat emptor" or words to that effect, but I suggest that it would be a desirable property of a service offering any kind of anonymity, to lead users -- especially novices -- away from trivial beginner's mistakes. -- Jay Freeman