Remailer Abuse Solutions

[Peter Hendrickson]

What do you do if you are operating a remailer and somebody complains
they are getting spammed?  That's easy, you keep a list of people that
you don't send mail to.  What's hard is if that person wants to receive
other anonymous mail.

The solution is easy: charge e-cash to send mail to certain addresses
and send the money to the owner of the account.  Never put an address
on a kill list, just raise the price of sending mail to it.  This
generates lots of positive publicity for your remailer.  People will
beg to be spammed!

And, since the remailer operator handles the financial parts of the
deal, the technically naive "victim" does not have to have specialized
knowledge or even an e-cash account.

This also eliminates the spam problem generally.  If you are plagued
by spam, create a list of names you will accept mail from.  When a
message comes in that is not on the list, return a message directing
them to send you the mail through a paying remailer.

This solves a problem for famous people, too.  They get lots of
mail but they don't have time to read it all.  How to sort it?  Raise
the price of sending a message.  (I heard that Arnold Schwarzeneggar
was once paid $1 million just to read a script and look at the set
of a movie with no obligation to act in it.)

Okay, now lets go to mailing lists.  We like to read anonymous mail
on this list, but we don't like getting spammed.  It's hard to filter
anonymous mail for obvious reasons.

The solution: don't accept anonymous mail.  Only people on the "approved"
list would be allowed to post.  People who wish to post anonymously
could then send mail through the paying remailer to people on the
"approved" list and request that their message be relayed.  Most people
on the list would be happy to accept a dollar or two to provide this
service.  This would eliminate inappropriate mail while allowing anybody
to post.

For that matter, postings to the list itself could be priced at, say,
a dollar to cut down on the noise levels.

Payments, and addresses which complicate payment, make it harder to
rely on the remailer network.  When you send a message through a
few remailers and make a faux pax on the last one, you won't know
what happened.  Did one of the remailers go down?  Did you make a
mistake?

I think I know a solution to this one, too.  If somebody wants to
get error messages, they include a random 128 bit number with their
message.  This is a different number for each remailer in the chain.
When an error occurs, the remailer distributes an error message
with the number attached.

Error message distribution is pretty easy.  The remailer operator
could publish a web page with the errors.  Or, the messages could
be bundled and made available through anonymous ftp, or mailed to
an error message mailing list, or posted to a newsgroup.

Peter Hendrickson
ph at netcom.com