Mark M. wrote:

On Sat, 9 Mar 1996, Michael Froomkin wrote:

...

I would be very grateful for pointers to data concerning the number of messages that pass through remailers. (Not anon.penet.fi -- real remailers.) I am currently in a conversation with a journalist who should know better, but claims that secure anonymous remailers are never used by anyone -- just a curiosity.

For most remailers, you can get the usage statistics by sending a message to the remailer with the subject line "remailer-stats."

Problem is that chaining interferes with this. A better way is to skin certain types of newsgroup headers over a period of time (a week or two) for messages sent from remailers. It will also give some stats as to what kinds of topics to people prefer anonymity. It's also rather interesting to see how much remailer traffic is used for posting rants/erotica/politically unpopular deas/heresies/criticism/ whistleblowing [I put these in the same category because they are related] and how many use them for the sake of just being anonymous [a regular participant who signs with an anonymous id/pgp-key but isn't necessarally posting something that requires anonyimity... hard to distinguish from first one though]. --Rob