From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 18:22:00 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Another Free Email Site with remailer possibilities
Message-ID: <3.0.2.32.19970815030611.02ff46e8@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Www.Iname.com is yet another free email site.  Its business model
is to offer free email forwarding from basic accounts
(paid for by advertising attached to the bottom of the mail),
with fancier-looking accounts and POP mailboxes for extra money.

They have very explicit anti-spam policies, but I'm not sure if
they really hunt down spammers, or if they just respond to complaints
by shutting off accounts and keeping the $0 or $15.
The policies would be no problem for a subscription-only exit remailer,
presumably no problem for a entry-only or middleman remailer,
and appear to ban non-subscription-based exit remailers.
They may or may not have a problem with the type of remailer that
sends a non-registered user a note saying "You've got anonymous mail;
send this cookie if you want to receive it"; my guess is they probably
drop free accounts after one complaint.

The free accounts look like username@iname.com, or a few other
lame domain names like cyberdude.com; one of them is 
"earthling.net", and I suspect the spammer who sent me mail
from one of those accounts was trying to pretend to be from 
earthlink.net ; I've probably blocked both of them by now.
You can only have one free account per destination address.

The advertising attached to the bottom of the mail messages
shouldn't be a problem for PGP-only remailers, assuming they
use some tolerable format and don't try to package your mail
in some MIME or HTML wrappers.  I can't tell, because they say
they won't start attaching ads until the extra-price-option
ad-remover software is available RSN.

The non-free accounts cost $15/year (first 60 days free)
for wider collection of domain names (including mail.com, 
which is usable, and some pure spam-bait names including 
seductive.com and credit4u.com.)

POP3 mailboxes cost $24/year.

Their security is really spotty - they use SSL for things
related to your bill, but not for passwords, at least for
free accounts....  It's easy to set up an account that
forwards mail to some third party; if you want to control
the thing, you have to point it to yourself first,
have it send you the password and confirmation,
then go log in to the member page and change your 
mail forwarding destination.  So it's unfortunately easy
to spam the innocent with an account at innocent.com
(they don't have guilty.com, though :-)

I've set up remailer1@disposable.com to point to
winsock@rigel.cyberpass.net  , which is a PGP-only remailer.
It'll expire in 60 days, unless someone wants to spend money,
but that's why it's remailer1@disposable.com....
It's got one of the usual passwords.



#			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 or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)