The Remailer Crisis

[Jonathan Rochkind]

At 4:49 PM 01/19/95, Jeff Licquia wrote:
>persuade someone offsite with control over a domain name (for example,
>"remailer.net" :-) to give you a mail alias on their domain, this would take
>a bit more effort to track than your typical "remailer.uiuc.edu" type
>domain.  This would make it less likely that the university would hear
>complaints, also, since most complainers would be more likely to complain to
>"postmaster at remailer.net" than "postmaster at uiuc.edu" if your machine was
>called "anon at anarchy.remailer.net" instead of "anon%anarchy.uucp at uiuc.edu"
>or "anon at anarchy.uiuc.edu".

I was thinking of this same thing.  I'm hopefully going to have a unix box
on the net in my college dorm room soon, but I'm a bit hesitant to run a
remailer on it.   I'm a bit scared to ask whether it would be allowed, on
the "it's better to get forgiveness then permission" line of thought.  But
I'd rather avoid the potential of having to get forgiveness either.  If my
site had a "machine.remailer.net" address, there would be many benefits.
For one, I don't have to worry about some administrator coming accross a
list of anon remailers (in a Time magazine scare-tactic article, eek!), and
noticing that one of them appears to be operating from some student's dorm
room, and secondly, as Jeff says, people who complain are just going to
complain to admin at remailer.net. They aren't going to take the time to try
to figure out that my IP address is really in oberlin.edu, and complain to
postmaster at oberlin.edu.  So administration at oberlin would never even realize
I was running a remailer, and since they haven't yet made any indication
that that would be against the rules, I would be in a good position.

Maybe it's time for Eric to figure out what he's going to do with remailer.net.