The ISP which I have used for over five years, portal.com, is going out of business at the end of this month (September, 1996). This means that my remailer at hfinney@shell.portal.com will cease operations. I had asked that it be removed from the remailer lists a few weeks ago due to some problems, so hopefully not many people have been using it lately. But now it will go away for good. This remailer has been in operation since the fall of 1991. I believe it has been the longest continually running remailer on the net. It was one of the first "cypherpunk" remailers, based on Eric Hughes' code, to which I added support for PGP messages. (Actually there was a remailer running out of Australia for a short time earlier in 1991 which was the first to use PGP. It was a very nice system but got shut down supposedly due to traffic concerns, although there seemed to be some politics involved as well.) I have also been running a remailer from my account at hal@alumni.caltech.edu. However that one cannot tolerate abuse complaints, hence I have been forwarding all mail out of that remailer through the portal one, for a number of years. Now that Portal is gone, this will be a problem. I plan to restrict the alumni remailer to only send mail to other addresses on a fixed list, which will initially be just the other remailers. That way the remailer can be used to form chains, but not to send to end users. This limited functionality should still be useful. It may be possible to create a web page where people can sign up to say they would not object to receiving anonymous mail. Most people are open minded and curious enough that they wouldn't mind signing such a list. Make it easy enough and you will collect thousands of names. Now people who want to create nyms using remailer chains for return addresses can add their names to the list without feeling that they are compromising their identity. They can use a remailer which only sends to people on the list as the last remailer in their chain, with some confidence that the remailer is unlikely to be shut down due to abuse complaints. Hal