Re: remailer signature suppression

Marc Horowitz wrote on Dec 23:
 
    I think that signatures should be kept.  If you really want to be
    anonymous, you have bigger things to worry about than your sig
    showing up or not.
 
I don't follow Marc's logic here. If the wrong sig shows up, it
obviously negates all other precautions taken in using remailers, etc.
 
    And if I want to build a pseudonymous identity for myself, I might
    want to have a sig for that identity.  I wouldn't want the
    remailers stripping that out.
 
The problem is if you want to send a mixture of anonymous and
regular mail. This involves changing the "sig" on the fly; difficult
to do reliably with an automatic script. With loss of anonymity the
consequence of the wrong sig appearing with either anonymous or non-
anonymous messages.
 
    Perhaps it would make sense to have a header field which indicated
    if the sig should be kept or not.
 
This might be a good compromise.  Of course I would prefer the
signature-screen: Yes to be the default.  Also don't forget that
for those of us who can't specify net-headers at will this new
header would also have to be specifiable within text via the ::
convention or otherwise.

--
edgar@spectrx.saigon.com (Edgar W. Swank)
SPECTROX SYSTEMS +1.408.252.1005  Silicon Valley, Ca

There are very good reasons to build remailers (and all mail tools)
to pass on all the bytes they can, trailing spaces and .sigs included.
  Might I sugjest that we set up the remailers with a feature where it
tests mail sent from its owner to make sure there is no "compromising"
content and that the outer shell verifies correctly, if it fails
either of these tests it is dumped in a file and a note returned to
you saying someings not right.
  This has two good features, first you know that what you send out is
good looking stuff and that if someone complains that its likely the
falut of some machine between the two of you and not you.  Second
this gets folks running remailers everywhere just as part of the
infrastructure of using cryptoware.
  Does this sound like something we can build upon for everyone?

		||ugh Daniel