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not!!! I should have made this clear, but imho no matter how favorably the public sees anonymity, I still believe there will be little incentive to run remailers until there is some kind of ecash scheme.

I hope this is not true. Some of us simply believe it is important to help people with unpopular opinions speak without fear of harassment. I for one will continue to operate a free remailer even if the technology becomes available to charge for the service. I hope others will, too. Some people do care about things other than money. I hope the reason there aren't more remailers out there is simply that it is sort of a pain to set one up, rather than simply because nobody cares.

...

People seem to forget that anyone can drop a letter into the mailbox with no return address. Did the Unabomber bring negative publicity to the postal service, causing people to demand that return addresses become a requirement? :-/

agreed, but the subject at hand was not whether anonymity is good or bad, but whether there is some incentive to run remailers.

Well, wanting there to be remailers is a good incentive to run one. Another good incentive is if you ever want to send a truly sensitive anonymous message. If you chain through your own remailer, then you can be absolutely sure that at least one remailer in your chain is not run by "bad guys."

I would be interested if any longtime remailer operators posted statistics about the amount of mail going through their services.

Usage statistics are publicly available from mixmaster remailers by sending mail with subject "remailer-stats". Whenever I've checked, the number of messages through the lcs mixmaster remailer has been around 300/day. This is neither a longtime remailer nor a particularly accurate statistic, but it should give you some idea. mix-admin@anon.lcs.mit.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMZ//ZETBtHVi58fRAQHePQP+JQcCu/zDfhRB1BLOea+OSENfM6qRxj0h KlYtV5O+IgcmlfZ+vupbtds6IrL8GN5YAQ7kpLoSCIUPC3+r4X0ppJjqgETEYI23 cJoZU9tG3Csj+KNSRn7tDjXdPFcGooqemvhV5SERiQEkAYqzRBDCcd7VQTOGgls5 TTRHxUQ1F+c= =DOAo -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----