CDR: Re: Anonymous Remailers

[dmolnar]

On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, Steve Furlong wrote:

> cost might be a little extra electricity. No funding is necessary unless
> the usage is so high that my ISP bitches at me. Personal time involved
> in maintaining the system will, I hope, be low; if it's more than
> negligible I won't be able to do it. I can see the sense of running the
> plan past a lawyer, but why would there be a continuing expense in this
> area?

People will use your remailer to send spam and death threats. There may
even be people who will use your remailer to send spam and death threats
to themselves, simply because they hate remailers. The recipients will
contact you and your ISP. Repeatedly.

My impression from reading alt.privacy.anon-server is that for many ISPs,
it doesn't take too much of this before the ISP asks the remailer to
leave. It's not a question of legal liability so much as the spam and the
hassle. (An example of how life is lived mainly outside the law, though
maybe in view of it.)

You can implement spam-blocking filters on your remailer...but that's
another can of worms. 

-David