In writing my client-end software for my anonymous server I came across the difficulty of building remailer paths because I was unsure that the cypherpunks remailers all act in a similar fashion, with a certain set of syntax. I've been out of touch with the list lately so maybe I missed something, but some sort of standard would be a good idea so that even though the underlying guts of the remailers, and even the latency, padding, and special features of remailers are different, there is a standard set of commands and actions which will make it easier to build tools for the user to make remailing easier. Here's my suggestion.. Header pasting: The '::' header pasting syntax should be available-- i.e. when a message comes into a remailer with a body starting with '::' the lines following until a blank line are pasted into the header. The '##' header pasting syntax-- when a remailer is sending out a message, if the body begins with a '##' line then the lines following that are pasted into the header of the outgoing message. Header commands: "Anon-To","Request-Remailing-To": strips headers and sends the message to the specified recipient. "Encrypted: PGP": The message has a pgp block encrypted with the remailer's key. The remailer will decrypt the pgp block before acting furthur upon the message. I *think* that this is the scheme that all the remailers are using, but I can't be sure. All remailers should have at *least* this functionality. Furthur features can be added-- commands for those could be standardized as well, but I can't think of anything. Comments? I can put this standard up on the ftp site, after some discussion. -Sameer