Re: anonymous mailing lists

[Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>]

From: Jeffrey A Nimmo <janimmo@ionet.net>
> On Fri, 28 Jun 1996 ichudov@algebra.com wrote:
> > Then users of alpha.c2.org will have to install mail filters that
> > automatically delete all incoming mail not intended to be read by them
> > (they can't read such messages anyway).
> 
> How exactly would this be done? Since messages from alpha.c2.org
> are conventionally encrypted, they don't contain key id's. 
> 
> Wouldn't that require every recipient to store his/her passphrase
> and call pgp for every message to see if it could be decrypted? This in
> and of itself would be a more serious security breach, not to mention an 
> _enormous_ drain on site resources. 

Since the PGP is run on private computers, and only at mail-reading time,
there should be no problem entering the conventional encryption
passphrase and checking to see whether the messages decrypt.  Actually
PGP puts a pattern at the beginning of the encrypted portion, so
successful decryption can be checked very quickly, without much of a
computational load.

Hal