Recipient Anonymity

[Matthew Ghio]

3umoelle at informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Ulf =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6ller?=) wrote:

> How are messages selected?  It seems that the recipient needs to know
> the message IDs of all messages in the system, and must have a way to
> identify his messages.

Yes.  Message-IDs on usenet average around 30-35 bytes each, so for a
typical remailer one might have to download 1000 Message-IDs, which would
take about 32K, not much bigger than the message itself.

You could also use MD5 hashes of the messages, in which case a list of
1000 message-IDs would take only 16K.  (In the unlikely event of a hash
collision you could download those two messages seperately.  Unless the
number of messages was huge (millions), you could probably get away with
using only a 32 or 64-bit hash function.)