From: tribble@xanadu.com (E. Dean Tribble)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 93 19:57:51 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: remailer architecture (and signatures)
Message-ID: <9301030327.AA13331@xanadu.xanadu.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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First a brief description of the new (read not-yet-available) remailer
architecture, then what's this means to signatures, etc.

The new remailer design comes from the realization that mail systems
are missing configurability on both sides of message delivery:  when
you receive mail, and when you send it.  Most of the 'remailer' is
just the infrastructure to allow programmatic modification to messages
in those two phases of delivery.  With this infrastructure, remailers
are trivial to construct.

There will be an Incoming Mail Rewriting Agent (IMRA) and on Outgoing
Mail Rewriting Agent.  The behavior of these agents is specified by
production/rewrite rules (match a pattern and take corresponding
action, possibly recurring) on the mail message they are processing.

The incoming agent is much like the existing framework for remailers.
It is invoked through .forward and handles mail before it gets to yout
mailbox.  The outgoing agent is invoked when you send mail to do any
rewriting necessary then (such as encryption, signture, etc.).

Note that .signature handling is a grody hack in existing mail systems
that directly implements a rather uninteresting piece of outgoing mail
rewriting (I had fun writing that :-).  It should just be junked for
the more general scheme, which can support real crypto signatures (and
.sig files, of course) for pseudonyms, outgoing encryption, automatic
remailer routing (a header: 'Hops: 3' that would route the mail
through 3 remailers to the eventual destination), etc.

It of course won't be junked immediately, but the default behavior of
remailers should certainly not be to strip anything that looks like
sigs.  Can we guarantee that all the tools that produce ascii
encodings like uuencode will never produce the trivial pattern that
the remailers thinks means 'signature.'  For example, hypertalk
comments start with '--', just like signatures.