Eric Hollander stated some reasonable concerns about my using the Cypherpunk remailers.... I have every intention of trying to be as responsible about this as I can be. I may sound cocky about it at times but I am doing that on purpose to try to get some attention to my questions. I am genuinely interested in which remailers can take some traffic. You all DID ask for more traffic. Here are some random thoughts. 1) Five 40K mails sent at in a row, maybe 3-5 sec. apart doesn't feel like I'm mail-bombing a remailer. Were these 400K I'd feel pretty guilty. If I'm feeling like testing limits, I might send 20 mails instead (to myself) but so far this hasn't caused even a glitch. Soda and cicada seemed to go down out of the blue, not in the middle of one of my tests. Soda just added a delay of an hour so that's not really "dead", but cicada did have a heart attack once and bounced a few mails before recovering. 2) I will never send this package of five mails (~18-46K each) to any mailing list unless I do it by sad mistake. I am receiving 6-12 or more messages a day with Subject "Bomb me!", so I wouldn't call this unsolicited. The only time a person will get the package without asking me personally for it is if they post to Usenet or this mailing list asking where to get info on PGP. If you are worried about this I could certainly switch to just sending a note for them to send me a "Bomb me!". 3) Before I send off a round in the morning (usually about 5-6 "Bomb me!"s), I send a small "Ping!" message to all the remailers on the list below to make sure they are working. 4) Here is a list of remailers that I am considering and my experience with them. I am personally only interested in fast ones (less than 1 hour delay). I have tagged a header onto each of my mails telling people NOT to reply to the remailer address and to try again the next day if one part doesn't get through. 1 hh@pmantis.berkeley.edu <-[Very fast.] 2 elee7h5@rosebud.ee.uh.edu <-[Very fast.] 2 hfinney@shell.portal.com <-[Fast. Warning header.] 1 hh@cicada.berkeley.edu <-[Very fast, may die and bounce mail.] 1 hh@soda.berkeley.edu <-[Very fast, may add an hour.] ? catalyst@netcom.com <-[Fast. Warning header.] 2 ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu <-[Fast, often adds an hour.] ? nowhere@bsu-cs.bsu.edu <-[Fast, but removes Subject header!] ? remailer@chaos.bsu.edu <-[Fast, but removes Subject header!] 1: Remailer accepts only plain text headers. 2: Remailer accepts both plain text and encrypted headers. 5) I am trying to get a perl script to output csh shell variables instead of printing to the screen. Help. I want to make the remailing route random, thus. Alan Barrett has just posted what I think is an answer to how I could do this. Maybe I should do the entire thing within perl? I'm not having much fun reading 'man perl'. 6) Question: should I or should I NOT chain each piece between two remailers. Will this increase the load? It is certainly what I've heard people dreaming about here. I have a mental block concerning what the effect on remailer load this would have. 7) I would appreciate, as would many, a short list of remailers and some specs about their qualities and an idea of who is running them, and how stable they have each been in the last year. catalyst@netcom.com seems durable, and yet I'd never heard of it till someone just mentioned it in this mailing list. Are soda and cicada indeed fragile (should I use them)? When they are up I seem to be able to use them without a problem. Why is jarthur sometimes very fast and other times adds an hour or more delay? -Xenon P.S. Remailer stablility is especially important when chaining remaliers, since bounced messages will never get back to you. I feel that a next generation of remailers should not just be concerned with security but with total internet-like e-mail reliability, as well an easy return address option so I can use them with more people. I think command-line interfaces are going bye bye fast, for those who will be the majority of e-mailers in the near future.