From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 23:38:19 -0800 (PST)
To: Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: remailer spam throttle
In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970330132722.006f1bdc@netcom9.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.19970331233242.00633a98@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 01:40 PM 3/30/97 -0800, Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> wrote:
>Reply blocks are unreliable anyway. 
Yeah, but they're a moderately useful kluge in that they
let you separate the information about how to find an anonymous recipient
into at least two places, which is far more secure than just one.
They're relatively annoying to use, but the nymserver approach
makes it possible to use them without the average user messing
with the details.

>The current piggy backing of recipient anonymity
>on systems designed to provide sender anonymity can not work reliably and
>must therefore be replaced by a separate design.

Is this a distributed-commercial-remailer-boxes approach, 
or something different?  It's a hard problem to do right.

In a large-scale system, one good design is to have a Pipenet
or equivalent that's used to pick up POP-mail.  It needs enough
traffic/users/bandwidth to achieve Obscurity, but if you could
convince people to carry their Usenet feeds as cover traffic,
that'd be more than enough :-)  Store-and-forward variants are
less reliable, but may do a good enough job, or I suppose you
could cook up some sort of distributed message pools.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#     (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)