anon.penet.fi remailers

>For example, if at any time, Alice sends pseudonymously to Bob, Bob can
>not reply directly: this would expose his identity at anon.penet.fi.
>Bob must reply through a remailer.
>
>Note the irony -- Bob must take special steps to protect his pseudonym
>because anon.penet.fi is acting affirmatively to conceal his actual
>identity.  If Bob slips up and simply replies, he is exposed.

This, unfortunately, is true. I *have* to use a remailer to hide any
anon.penet.fi alias I have or the sender will see it and know I am
(for eg) anon1234@penet.

I balk at Yet-More-F******-Header-Lines (YMFHL) but a _possible_ patch
is to have a:

X-Show-My-Anon: yes|no       (in the header),

or:

::
X-Show-My-Anon: yes|no       (in the body)

addition so people who reply to a message from penet can feed their real email
address through the system rather than having it bounced to the recipient as
their anon id.  This would require either a smart mailer, checking exactly who
the orig letter was addressed to (your anon or your real address) and
inserting the line as appropriate. It *should* be automatic actually. All it
has to do is check a local list of your anon addressed and if someone has
mailed it then alter the above line as needed.

This raises question of the security of local lists of your anon addrs of
course.. but you get the idea..

Comments?

(BTW I saw someone's .sig where they *advertised* their anon id on USENET.
 Presumably this was because he thought thats what you had to do so others
 could email them anonomously... obviously he wont be a whistle blower :)

Mark
mark@coombs.anu.edu.au

> I balk at Yet-More-F******-Header-Lines (YMFHL) but a _possible_ patch
> is to have a:
> 
> X-Show-My-Anon: yes|no       (in the header),
> 
> or:
> 
> ::
> X-Show-My-Anon: yes|no       (in the body)

Yes. Thinking about something like this. But what is teh best syntax?

> (BTW I saw someone's .sig where they *advertised* their anon id on USENET.
>  Presumably this was because he thought thats what you had to do so others
>  could email them anonomously... obviously he wont be a whistle blower :)

Well, it could be somebody who doesn't care about his/her own anonymity,
but wants to make it as easy as possible to send anon mail to him/her.
It's so much easier to mail to anXXXX@anon.penet.fi than to use stuff
like user%host.domain@anon.penet.fi or hack around with strange extra
X-Anon-* headers (especially with anally-retentive mailers etc.).

	Julf