[86949] in Cypherpunks
Re: encouraging digital pseudonyms
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert A. Costner)
Mon Sep 22 18:50:25 1997
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 17:45:58 -0400
To: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>
Cc: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.96.970922031430.14500A-100000@eskimo.com>
Reply-To: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>
At 03:16 AM 9/22/97 -0700, Wei Dai wrote:
>When I see a piece of email sent to the cypherpunks list
>from an anonymous remailer, I typically delete it without reading, because
>there is no easy way to tell between anynoymous email (which are typically
>junk) and pseudonymous email, and there is no easy way to filter by
>pseudonym.
Perhaps I am missing something here. I find it easy to distinguish type-I
anonymous traffic from nym mail. Anonymous mail usually comes from an
address like 'anon@' or 'nobody@' while pseudonymous mail will come from a
pseudonym.
A pseudonym is almost indistinguishable from a regular email address. The
only way you can tell is if your know the domain is a remailer domain.
Since there are very few stable nymservers in the world, it should not be
hard to filter for all of the stable nyms individually. If I was looking
or a generic way to filter out from all anonymous mail from the 3 to 12
nyms (depending on how you count) on the same domains, I'd look for the
word "anonymous" in the from field.
I successfully filter all anonymous mail I receive, but I assign it a color
rather than rejecting anonymous mail.
-- 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
