Re: The Remailer Crisis

[jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind)]

At 11:14 PM 01/20/95, Rhys Kyraden wrote:
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>Okay. Here's my 2-bits.
>I run on the MacOS, but how hard could it be to port this code?

If you are talking about remailer code, rather, I think.  The mac doesn't
have a built in mail system, like unix systems generally do, which you kind
of need.    First you've got to get a hold of a mail system for the MacOS,
ideally not POPMail like Eudora, but actual receiving mail directly to your
mac, and then you've got to modify it to do remailing.  And that
modification isn't going to be nearly as easy as in the world of unix with
it's .forward files and /etc configuration files that let you pretty much
direct output wherever you want.    Basically, the amount of code you are
going to have to be writing from scratch is going to outweigh any "porting"
you are able to do with salvagable code.

On the other hand, you could base a remailer on Eudora.  Which means that
people would right to your normal mail account with mail-to-be-remailed,
and by means of some header lines distinguish the mail to be remailed.
Eudora can filter mail according to header lines.  And Eudora is
applescriptable, and can call an external applescript (or actual binary
executable program, if it does apple events. Which isn't trivial), and tell
it new mail has arrived to be dealt with.  Theoretically the external
program could even check the body of the message for a
::
Request Remailing-To:
So they wouldn't need to put anything special in the header, like they
don't need to with current remailers, even ones that run out of people's
normal shell accounts.

Theoretically, you could do that. But it would be rather unreliable, and
slow.  And if there was a lot of remailer traffic, it would get in the way
of your normal email.  I'm not sure it's worth putting in the amount of
effort neccesary for what you are going to get.  On the other hand, the
amount of effort neccesary would be much much less then writing remailer
code which worked with a mac mail system instead of POP mail, as discussed
above. I dunno.