Re: Misunderstanding of Remail Headers

["L. McCarthy" <lmccarth@ducie.cs.umass.edu>]

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Hal writes:
> One thing I do notice on reading the discussion in can.politics is the
> fact that despite the disclaimers in the message headers, some people
> took this as a forgery attempt on my part.  I wonder if it might be
> necessary to insert disclaimers into the body of the message as
> anon.penet.fi does, at least for messages to known mail-to-news
> gateways.
> 
> There was also a misperception that my remailer was an official effort
> endorsed by Portal (again, despite the disclaimers).  Note that it was
> they who were contacted, not me (yet).  This might suggest that it will
> not be possible to cleanly separate the remailer operators and service
> providers when problems like this arise.  Both may end up being hassled
> (time will tell whether I am).

This is all too familiar to me. Although I still haven't heard the official
line on the shutdown of Underdog following the Scythe spam, at least some 
people locally (including, crucially, my advisor) received the impression that
I had forged (and authored !) the offending news articles in spite of the
disclaimer headers.

Furthermore, the spam might not have been a fatal blow if not for the fact
that some people ignored the "complaints to <lmccarth@ducie.cs.umass.edu>" 
header and wrote directly to root or postmaster here. Everyone who actually
wrote to me came away satisfied that I was taking appropriate action, as 
far as I could tell.

I'll take this opportunity to reiterate that I'm no longer operating a 
remailer at this address. I wrote to Matt Ghio about a week ago asking him
to remove my address from remailer-pings@chaos.bsu.edu, but I suppose he's
busy with school these days. That list remains frozen with information 
dating from Nov.22. Karl Barrus mentioned something about chaos.bsu.edu
having moved to chaos.taylored.com; perhaps this is part of the reason for
the snag ?

- - -L. Futplex McCarthy; PGP key by finger or server  "We've got computers, 
we're tapping phone lines; I know that that ain't allowed" --Talking Heads

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