From: yanek@novavax.nova.edu (Yanek Martinson)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 92 10:46:45 PST
To: cordones@IMAGE.CS.NYU.EDU (Deus Ex Machina)
Subject: Re: ping..mailing list integrity..
In-Reply-To: <9211271659.AA21574@IMAGE.CS.NYU.EDU>
Message-ID: <9211271846.AA25768@novavax.nova.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> Me too. In fact, I am insecure my message ever got through because no one
> has said anything about it. It was regarding "The NSA backsdown". I was
> asking how could point me to thse so called "secret" documents that are

I have not received it.  It may have just been a local network problem
on your side.  But it may also have been covert action (if you are 
paranoid enough to believe it). 

I have an idea how we could make it possible for eveyone to be SURE that
their message to the list actually went out; and also they could be certain
that they have not missed any list messages.  

This is very important for people with unreliable or untrusted e-mail
connections.

The idea is:  whenever cypherpunks@toad.com receives a message, it would
append the From:, Date:, and Subject: headers to a file, thus creating
an index of messages passing through the list.  At the end of each day,
the file would be mailed out to the list.

So if you posted a message, you could check in the evening if it got
out or not.  If you are not sure if you are receiving all the messages,
you could maintain a simlar file yourself, and at the end of day compare
your notes with what is received from the list.

This should not be difficult to set up at all.

This could be later improved in several ways.  First, the message could
be signed by the list administrator (in case you think your mailfeed
is filtering what you receive, and is also removing these items from 
the index).

These indexes could be kept for a week or so, and either only the lists, 
or maybe even any of the individual messages that may have been missed
could be requested via a mailserver.  This could work similarly to the
CRYOMSG: facility of the Cryonix mailing list.


--
Yanek Martinson    mthvax.cs.miami.edu!safe0!yanek     uunet!medexam!yanek
this address preferred -->> yanek@novavax.nova.edu <<-- this address preferred
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