Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com> writes:

At 05:37 PM 4/1/97 -0500, Andy Dustman wrote:

...

consider this a compromise between normal blocking (deliver unless told otherwise) and middleman (get someone else to deliver it), which I would sum up as: Ask permission before delivering the first time, and once granted, deliver until told otherwise.

An alternative approach is - ask before delivering _every_ time, unless - accept deliver-without-asking-again responses to cookies. This leaves the recipient the middle ground of granting permission for one message without granting it for all future messages, which is probably good for people unfamiliar with remailers. (Also, the permission-once == permission-always model doesn't stop spamming - a spammer can send a whole bunch of messages to the recipient, and if the recipient's response to the first "You have anon-mail" cookie is "That's interesting, let's see what it is", they get all the spam.)

I got a 60MB mailbomb the other day which didn't bother me a least bit. That wasn't done via the remailers; it came via worldnet.att.net's open smtp server. The initial form letter asking for permission should warn about the possibility of their getting a large amount of crap. However it's just as easy to get a throwaway account and mailbomb someone via that. I say: discard (don't keep) e-mail for folks who haven't explicitly unblocked themselves; treat "unblock" as "unblock everything and face the consequences". Letting the user impose some sort of constraint on the size of the e-mail being remailed is actually a dumb idea: * any half-decent mail handler should do it on the user's side * they can be mailbomed by a 1000 little messages --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps