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Are remailers in a healthy state at the moment? Do large email providers accept mail sent through them or just mark it as spam?
by eVeechu7 6y ago
Are remailers in a healthy state at the moment? Do large email providers accept mail sent through them or just mark it as spam?
- giantrobot 6y agoI doubt there's a ready network of cypherpunk remailers sitting around at the moment. I seem to recall (~20 years ago) a lot of remailers ended up with spam problems. However the system by which they operate is relatively easy to implement by volunteers. The model is very similar to Tor's onion routing (they're both Chaumian mix networks). I could see middle relays run by volunteers on their Gmail accounts (or whatever) with exit nodes being established addresses specifically for the purpose of being exit nodes. Exit nodes might require messages be signed by a publicly available key or one registered with the exit node. The sender does need a public key for all the hops. So the final recipient needs to have a key known to the sender. While spammers could send stuff to people they know public keys for, they wouldn't necessarily be able to send random spam to people. IIRC in the historical spam problems the sender would make an anonymous (non-crypto) remailer the final recipient so the network would forward the encrypted messages around but the last one would remail the unencrypted message to an included distribution list or listserve or something. Since anonymous remailers aren't a thing anymore that spam vector is closed. Remailers were an interesting thing a long time ago. Because they work on extant infrastructure I think they could be a cool thing again.