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Seems to me that the UNIX model of building one mail transport instead of 20 is a good one. If you seperate out the UA from the transport, you make it easy to fix or update the transport.

I agree.

So I would suggest, rather than hacking at Winsock and hoping to catch the right protocols, build a set of libraries that can be called by programs. smtp.dll, for example, would be a mailer that any mail program could call. nntp.dll would handle news, underneath all the various interfaces. If you want to pretend to be premail, you do it in smtp.dll.

This is of course much closer to the ideal way of doing things. However, the original motivation for this project was that in order for all existing Winsock based mail agents (except for Zmail, it looks like now) to add crypto/anonymity to their functionality, some work has to be done to change them. The system I came up with to spoof Winsock would be (hopefully!) transparent, in that it would work with _existing_ mailers _today_. To go the route you outlined, while in the long run a much more sensible way of doing things, would require the same sort of effort on the part of the current mail agents, i.e., they would need to change. Your suggestion is one I would like to follow up on; in the mean time, I am going to make an attempt at the spoofing idea.

The advantage to other programmers is that they no longer have to do the low level stuff that they had to before. It allows programmers build whats interesting, namely, the interface & gizmos.

Hehe. It's the user interface I hate doing the most!

Make the package do the user interface side of things, and make a seperate package to do the network protocols. Makes building, testing, and changing things a lot easier. And while you're at it, store all of your files as text. :)

Nah. Variable bit sized binary records work well enough :) ======================================================================= Johnathan Corgan "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" jcorgan@netcom.com -Isaac Asimov PGP Public Key: http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html Or send email to: pgp-public-keys@pgp.ai.mit.edu Subj: GET jcorgan ======================================================================= -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLu4cV01Diok8GKihAQEQqwP/T1XQPJYPHyVZWB3sAO1Fl8TdgikW+I/6 1/XnNitgm7WwwUdadGFx0gVEzbmwN0yRbwntKV/M8wuYG+0oQ2NPBBSoBDMbUYqR OmIjUDg7P+v7X4Ga4B6MLeca6bemxYGT+Jv3F4xTQrohyUyNc+zMBR6CPWrv5d7g NQzIeTsIn/M= =Tagz -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----