Re: Cooperation

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

At 3:43 PM 02/06/95, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>I'd say that it would work far better if things were changed to MIME
>formats. You would send a message by recursively encapsulating your
>message to be remailed inside a MIME message. Simple and clean...

Well... perhaps for a future remailer standard.  I think the purpose of an
RFC at this point is to clearly outline how it is that present remailers
work, and standardize the working somewhat, and provide a document for
people writing new remailers to look at to make sure their remailers work
like everyone elses (or are a superset of the "Standard Type 1 Remailer"
functions, a superset which certainly could include MIME or anything else).
The point is to accurately describe how most remailers work now, rather
then propose a major change in the way most remailers work.  The latter has
a place, but the former seems more pressing, as well as easier to do, and
perhaps a first step to the latter.

Changing "Request-Remailing-To:" to "Anon-Send-To:" is trivial, in that it
would be an incredibly minor code change, and in that some remailers
already implement "Anon-Send-To:".  But changing everything to MIME would
not be so trivial, and if we published a "standard" that said to do it with
MIME, we'd end up with a standard that in fact no one follows, that doesn't
accurately describe the way things are.  The remailers are definitely
evolving,  and it's been mentioned that it might be a good idea to have a
Type 1 Remailer standards document, and a Type 2 Remailer standards
document, etc.  But it seems of primary importance to first publish a
standard of how the remailers _are_ (Type 1 remailer), instead of how we
might wish they could be.   (Type 1 remailer with MIME, Type 2 remailer,
whatever).

As for the idea of using MIME headers in itself, I'm a bit concerned that
it might make it overly complicated to put together a to-be-remailed
message by hand.  I'm not entirely familiar with MIME and recursive
encapsulation of MIME, so my concern might be ungrounded.  But I think it
might be a Good Thing that it's easy to remail a message by hand by adding
a simple "::\nAnon-Send-To:" at the top, and it would be a mistake to make
it more complicated or dificult to do this by hand, unless it's really
neccesary for some reason.