REMAIL: policy

17 Dec 2003

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Tim asks about remailer policy: here is mine.

About logging: I think there are two kinds of logs remailers can keep.
By default, the "archive.remail" and "archive.pgp" (and
"archive.ripem") files are kept, which record messages as they pass
through.  Also, there is debugging logging, which records stuff like
the return value of pipes, user environment variables, whether pasting
tokens and message delimiters are found, etc.  Further, Hal showed how
the maildelivery file can be extended to log usage only - an entry
appended to a file for every use (see the cypherpunks gopher site :-)
in "Anonymous Mail" for how to do this).

I don't keep debugging logging or archive logging - I unlink the
archive.* files every time slocal is invoked.  Actually, I don't keep
usage logs either.  However, I haven't had a chance to drop in a
sendmail agent, so there is always the syslog file I can't control.

Hm.. I suppose I could just remove the relevant lines from the
maildelivery file and avoid the archive.* files completely.  I will do
that.

Errors (malformed messages) are dropped in the elee7h5@rosebud and
elee6ue@rosebud remailers, and get forwarded to me
(klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu) from the elee9sf@menudo.uh.edu remailer.
This is so mail intended for me but sent to my old address still gets
here.

Furthermore, the elee7h5@rosebud remailer is locked - I can't log in
anymore.  But, the directory structure is preserved, the remailer
still works last time I tried, and I mailed to the admin asking him to
contact me about this about two weeks ago, and haven't heard back. 

Encryption: elee7h5@rosebud, elee6ue@rosebud, elee9sf@menudo support
PGP encryption.  Also elee9sf@menudo supports RIPEM.

Caching: elee9sf@menudo caches messages, remailing in a random order
at midnight.  More precisely, it caches them in random order and mails
out every midnight.  So if you wrap your PGP encrypted message inside
a RIPEM encryption, it will stay until midnight the first day to
unwrap the RIPEM, and then will stay till midnight the next day to
unwrap PGP to get the remailing request.

Message padding: I'm experimenting with this, but not in production
mode just yet.  It's easy enough to pad so the messages waiting to be
remaild are the same size, but I want to extend this so what leaves
via sendmail or it's replacement is also the same size.

Ownership: well, these are all school accounts so I don't have final
authority over the machines.  

Karl Lui Barrus

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