It occurs to me that most people have more to fear from their neighbors, than they do from the powerful TLA's. Knowing that you are hunting for a new job is not important to the world at large, but could be embarrassing if your current employer found out. Likewise, the people most interested in knowing about that sex list you subscribe to are your coworkers. The answer of course is encryption, but that is a problem when you are writing to your, well... , "crypto challenged" friends. Also, two way encrypted messages to most discussion lists is not possible (to my knowledge). To address these problems I suggest the creation of "crypto remailers". They would work like this: You subscribe to the remailer by sending a request including the account name you wish. This could be either a real name (jpinson) or a pseudonym (lizard). You would also include in the subscription request a copy of your public key. Assuming there are no name collisions with existing users, you would get back a message of acceptance, and a copy of the remailers public key. To use the remailer, you would create a message containing as the first line a "request remail to: USERNAME" , followed by your message. You then encrypt the message with the remailers public key and send it to the "remail" account at the remailer. The remailer then decodes the message you sent, and sends it to its destination as plain text. It sets the "from" field to your account name on the remailer. The recipient of your message can then reply to your remail account in plain text, with no need for any "remail to " commands or special processing. A .forward pipe on your remailer account would run a Perl script to encode the message to you with your public key, and send it to your real address. (for security it could set the "from" field to something other than your remail account name) The advantage is that you have total protection at your end. All mail to and from the remail account is encrypted. You could now subscribe to lists, and receive mail from lists, without your local administrator knowing anything about them. This last feature could be useful for students at universities that limit access. Is there anything like this out there already? Jim Pinson Charles Darwin Research Station, Galapagos