Question for remailer operators

For the anon remailer operators out there:

I'm looking for figures on the average number of messages that pass through
the different remailers a day (or week, or whatever).  This is for an
article I'm working on to be published in a local paper here in NYC.  I'd
appreciate any numbers I can get from any of you.  Estimates are fine if
you don't have exact figures.

(Sorry to spam the list like this.  It's just that I'm sure my list of
remailers is very out of date, and even if it's not, I wouldn't know how to
reach the operators of most of them.)

Many thanks.

   --Dave.

--
Dave Mandl
dmandl@panix.com

Hi!

Dave Mandl wrote:

> I'm looking for figures on the average number of messages that pass through
> the different remailers a day (or week, or whatever).  This is for an
> article I'm working on to be published in a local paper here in NYC.  I'd
> appreciate any numbers I can get from any of you.  Estimates are fine if
> you don't have exact figures.

I'm interested in these figures, too, since I'm currently trying to set up
a remailer at our local computing centre -- the first argument against it
was the lack of bandwidth, since the whole university is using two 64 kBit 
lines and these guys hope to get an 2 MBit line if they say "no" often 
enough...

It would be great if you could also give me some figures to compare with, f.e. 
something like "using WWW for one hour equals one day of normal remailer 
operation" (blind guess).

And, last question: Is there some sort of a FAQ or HOWTO "How to convince 
operators of the necessity / usefulness / non-evilness of anonymous remailers"?
					  ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 
					  (Is this a proper english word?)
 
Since this is my first posting to this list, I'll say something about myself:
I'm studying Sociology and Law at the Universitaet Bielefeld / Germany and 
sit too much in front of computers/X-Terminals. I'm not good at programming
and no mathematical genius (or whatever a Cypherpunk should be) -- I'm rather
generally interested in security and using cryptography.
Currently I'm trying to translate the docs for SFS, but I'm not too fast at 
that...

-Michael

I see about 200 messages a day through my remailer, sizes averaging a
couple of K.  I had the impression at one point that the VAST majority of
this was "cover" traffic that someone is generating just to keep the
network busy.  I don't know if this is still the case.  It might be
possible to opt out of the cover traffic generator to reduce your load
to a politically manageable level.  Maybe people generating cover traffic
could estimate how many messages they are generating.

My remailer is a little unusual as the alumni.caltech.edu remailer always
feeds into this one, so this may represent two remailers' worth of
traffic.

Hal