From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 23:02:27 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Remailer advertising
In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19971002024633.032b0028@mail.atl.bellsouth.net>
Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19971002103137.03132df0@mail.atl.bellsouth.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 04:12 AM 10/2/97 -0600, Racist Remailer wrote:
>  Also, advertising could be sent to the originator of anonymous
>remail,

This does seem like a second place that remailer advertising could be
"sold."  Advertising to the sender side seems like a better idea than
recipient advertising, but I'm not sure it would go over very well either.

When the crypto vote recently came up in Congress, I suggested putting
"advertising" about the vote on outgoing remailer messages.  This would
have involved promotion of non EFGA web pages.  The owners of such web
pages, who are pro-crypto, did not care for the association with a remailer.

For a recipient side ad, I thought of simply sending out a terms of service
message, perhaps replaced in the future by paid advertising.  We discussed
this, and decided that users would be bothered by getting return email when
they send the remailer a message.  We considered sending a return message
not with each message, but say only once per month, or only once every two
weeks.  Feedback I got on this was that users would not like the remailer
acknowledging them.  Obviously we would have to build some database of who
sent something when in order to make this work.  A database of who has sent
a message in the last two weeks is just another chink in the armor waiting
to be exploited.


  -- Robert Costner                  Phone: (770) 512-8746
     Electronic Frontiers Georgia    mailto:pooh@efga.org  
     http://www.efga.org/            run PGP 5.0 for my public key