[107558] in Cypherpunks
Re: token mailsystem
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Sun Jan 17 04:01:12 1999
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 1999 00:48:34 -0800
To: Tom Vogt <tv@wlwonline.de>, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
In-Reply-To: <369F1515.AD76CF69@wlwonline.de>
Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
At 11:14 AM 1/15/99 +0100, Tom Vogt wrote:
>is anyone aware of the existence of an anonymous token-based mailsystem?
>maybe using a different name, I'll try to explain. it's basically the
>reverse of an anonymous remailer.
There are a variety of things that are somewhat like what you want.
The big question is how much security you need -
if you're just trying to avoid spammers, it's easy,
while if you're trying to avoid being traced by the NSA, it's much harder.
- Hotmail, etc., can be used this way, optionally with a web anonymizer.
Sure, the account sticks around after you're done,
but it's basically disposable, and therefore abusable.
Unfortunately, they don't support SSL, so it's somewhat tappable
at the hotmail end.
- Juno is an interesting variant, since it's dialup access
rather than online. It is susceptible to phone tracing,
but you can set up and use the account through payphones.
- Julf's penet.fi remailer automatically created aliases like
an123456@penet.fi when you sent mail through it.
It wasn't cryptographically secure, but half a million people used it.
- There are some remailers that offer nymservers -
they've got variants on either the sender or the server having
an encrypted copy of the recipient's email address,
which the server decrypts (or in some versions,
the server has an encrypted copy, which it sends to
another remailer to decrypt, so the server can only divulge
the encrypted address for joeuser@nymserver.net,
and the other server also needs to be compromised to break it.)
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
