Remailer abuse

[nobody@alumni.cco.caltech.edu]

Thanks for the many suggestions posted here and sent privately to me
about ways to deal with the possible use of my remailer to send abusive
messages.  I have taken two steps, and I could fairly easily take a
third.

First, I sent a letter to the girl who complained explaining that the
message was not actually from me, that it was from an experimental
remailing software package, and telling her to let me know if she got
more objectionable messages.

Second, I changed the header line inserted by my remailer to what you see
above.  (This message is being forwarded by my remailer.)  Hopefully this
will clue people in to what is happening.  I didn't want to mess with the
message body based on the discussion we have had here on that issue.  I'd
appreciate comments about the wording and appropriateness of the header
line, if anyone can offer improvements.

(As an unprivileged user of this system, I do not have the ability to
create new accounts so that the message would appear to come from
"remailer".  The best I could do is get it into the From: line in the
header, but my name still shows in the "out of band" From line which
precedes the header.)

What I could do, if more "problem" messages come through, is create a
list of people _not_ to forward mail to.  Some people have suggested
the creation of a list not to forward mail _from_, but that is more
difficult in an environment of chained remailers (since I can't always
determine the message source).  It should be pretty easy to check to
see whether the destination of a remail request is on the list of
people "not to be bothered", and to not send it in that case.  We could
even share this list among the various remailer operators.  That does
not require any collusion or message logging, and it seems like it
should largely address the problem.

Hal
74076.1041@compuserve.com