Fen Labalme quotes some messages with concerns about people needing permission from the sysadmins to run remailers. The current remailers, based on Eric Hughes' approach, don't have this problem. I don't even know who the sysadmin is on the system where I run the remailer. They don't know anything about it. Eric's remailers don't require continual processes to be run, root privileges, hacking the mail tables, or anything special. All you need is to be on a Unix system which supports the ".forward" file. This is typically implemented by the mail programs which deliver mail to the user's mail file. The programs check to see if a file called .forward exists in the user's home directory, and if so they treat its contents as either a program to pipe the incoming mail into, or a user name or list of user names to send the mail to. This is the hook by which Eric's remailers operate. The .forward file is set up so that mail is piped to a program which sorts the mail based on its headers, using the mh utility slocal or, in my case, a perl script which provides some of the same functions. Each message is checked like this, and if it doesn't contain any of the special stuff which activates the remailer software, it is simply deposted in the user's mailbox file as usual. Otherwise the remailers run and forward it as requested. With this solution, there's no need for anybody to be aware that you are running a remailer, as long as it's not too much of a load in terms of extra message traffic. Hal 74076.1041@compuserve.com
participants (1)
-
ghsvax!hal@uunet.UU.NET