Portal remailer shutting down

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

The ISP which I have used for over five years, portal.com, is going
out of business at the end of this month (September, 1996).  This means
that my remailer at hfinney@shell.portal.com will cease operations.
I had asked that it be removed from the remailer lists a few weeks ago
due to some problems, so hopefully not many people have been using it
lately.  But now it will go away for good.

This remailer has been in operation since the fall of 1991.  I believe it
has been the longest continually running remailer on the net.  It was one
of the first "cypherpunk" remailers, based on Eric Hughes' code, to which
I added support for PGP messages.  (Actually there was a remailer running
out of Australia for a short time earlier in 1991 which was the first to
use PGP.  It was a very nice system but got shut down supposedly due to
traffic concerns, although there seemed to be some politics involved as
well.)

I have also been running a remailer from my account at
hal@alumni.caltech.edu.  However that one cannot tolerate abuse
complaints, hence I have been forwarding all mail out of that remailer
through the portal one, for a number of years.   Now that Portal is gone,
this will be a problem.  I plan to restrict the alumni remailer to only
send mail to other addresses on a fixed list, which will initially be
just the other remailers.  That way the remailer can be used to form
chains, but not to send to end users.  This limited functionality should
still be useful.

It may be possible to create a web page where people can sign up to say
they would not object to receiving anonymous mail.  Most people are
open minded and curious enough that they wouldn't mind signing such a
list.  Make it easy enough and you will collect thousands of names.  Now
people who want to create nyms using remailer chains for return addresses
can add their names to the list without feeling that they are
compromising their identity.  They can use a remailer which only sends to
people on the list as the last remailer in their chain, with some
confidence that the remailer is unlikely to be shut down due to abuse
complaints.

Hal