Metadata anonymization through time delayed email messaging.

[Sandy Harris]

Jeff Scofield <jscofiel at gmail.com> wrote:

> A person walks into a computer café at 10am and sets an email to send at
> around 4am the following morning (via cloud or machine).  The data gets sent
> at 4am when the building is empty.  ...
>
> Any and all feed back regarding this idea is welcome.

if you control the end-user sending machine & it runs some sort of Unix,
this is trivial; the required command is just:

at 04:00 mail whoever at example.net < message_file

Writing a script to do this using a random time would not be hard.

Of course this does not encrypt the file, though it could send a file
that was already encrypted. Nor does it provide any sort of
protection against someone who can snoop on the sending
machine (nothing I know of does!), so it does not work in your
Internet cafe example.

Better to modify the mail server to introduce a random delay.
This also does not look hard. Avoiding time stamps in the
Received: lines in the headers would also be necessary,
but that looks straightforward as well.

To block tracking, you also want to avoid putting the client
machine's IP address in the headers. Easily done, but it
makes it harder to deal with spammers.