What do you do if you are operating a remailer and somebody complains they are getting spammed? That's easy, you keep a list of people that you don't send mail to. What's hard is if that person wants to receive other anonymous mail. The solution is easy: charge e-cash to send mail to certain addresses and send the money to the owner of the account. Never put an address on a kill list, just raise the price of sending mail to it. This generates lots of positive publicity for your remailer. People will beg to be spammed! And, since the remailer operator handles the financial parts of the deal, the technically naive "victim" does not have to have specialized knowledge or even an e-cash account. This also eliminates the spam problem generally. If you are plagued by spam, create a list of names you will accept mail from. When a message comes in that is not on the list, return a message directing them to send you the mail through a paying remailer. This solves a problem for famous people, too. They get lots of mail but they don't have time to read it all. How to sort it? Raise the price of sending a message. (I heard that Arnold Schwarzeneggar was once paid $1 million just to read a script and look at the set of a movie with no obligation to act in it.) Okay, now lets go to mailing lists. We like to read anonymous mail on this list, but we don't like getting spammed. It's hard to filter anonymous mail for obvious reasons. The solution: don't accept anonymous mail. Only people on the "approved" list would be allowed to post. People who wish to post anonymously could then send mail through the paying remailer to people on the "approved" list and request that their message be relayed. Most people on the list would be happy to accept a dollar or two to provide this service. This would eliminate inappropriate mail while allowing anybody to post. For that matter, postings to the list itself could be priced at, say, a dollar to cut down on the noise levels. Payments, and addresses which complicate payment, make it harder to rely on the remailer network. When you send a message through a few remailers and make a faux pax on the last one, you won't know what happened. Did one of the remailers go down? Did you make a mistake? I think I know a solution to this one, too. If somebody wants to get error messages, they include a random 128 bit number with their message. This is a different number for each remailer in the chain. When an error occurs, the remailer distributes an error message with the number attached. Error message distribution is pretty easy. The remailer operator could publish a web page with the errors. Or, the messages could be bundled and made available through anonymous ftp, or mailed to an error message mailing list, or posted to a newsgroup. Peter Hendrickson ph@netcom.com