Remailer Pricing

[ph@netcom.com (Peter Hendrickson)]

At 6:02 PM 11/14/1996, Mullen Patrick wrote:
>Peter Hendrickson switched the transistors to say:
>> E-cash, the product licensed by Digicash, offers full payee anonymity and
>> would be an ideal candidate.

> Oops.  I forgot.  :-)  I guess this idea would work.  But, there would be a
> very large price for anonymity - two mailers holding their hands out for a
> piece of the pie.

> Well, I must admit you seem to have this idea pretty well thought out, and
> it just may work.  The hardest part of the plan would probably be gaining
> acceptance.  True, everyone loves getting a check, especially if all they
> had to do was open and close email to have it register as being read, but
> the hard part is getting people to accept having to pay to send someone a
> message.  Of course, there's the argument that currently we pay for stamps...
> :-)

It looks like I wasn't perfectly clear again.  Sorry about that.  The user
does not tell anybody whether or not the mail has been read.  In fact,
it's nobody's business but their own.  This is the advertiser's problem,
and I don't really care whether they solve it.  In fact, the user does
not have to put the remailer on the accept list.  He or she just has
to tell the remailer operator that they would like to receive a dollar
(or whatever) if the remailer operator sends them any mail.

Perhaps we've been thinking about anonymous mail the wrong way.  Is it
like the U.S. Post Office where you have to physically go someplace,
buy a stamp, physically write your message, put it in a physical envelope,
carry it to a box someplace, and then wait (maybe four days) for it to
arrive, all for "only" 32 cents?  Or is it more like Federal Express
where you pay 20 bucks and it arrives the next day, for sure, every time?

Earlier today somebody sent a message about his scary former employers
and (apparently) how they just kill people.  Would that person pay, say,
$5 to have the message delivered reliably and very anonymously?  My
judgement is that it would be worth every penny, and probably more.

Right now the remailer network is a mess.  There just aren't that many
remailers operating in a timely and reliable manner.  I am not knocking
the remailer operators for this, it's just clear that "free" doesn't
make it worth their while to keep the remailers operating perfectly
at all times.

It is especially important that anonymous mail be delivered in a timely
and reliable manner because you probably will not have a good way to
verify that it arrived.  And reliability is absolutely required if
you are chaining remailers because errors multiply.  The top five
remailers in Raph's latest report had these reliabilities: 99.77%,
99.28%, 99.23%, 99.18%, and 98.78%.  If you chain those remailers, your
failure rate is 3.71%, which is just too high.

And, the long delays in sending messages through the remailers make it
hard for people to get up and running because it takes hours to determine
whether it worked, if it worked at all.

Furthermore, many remailers don't use 2048-bit keys.  Why not?  Because
they don't want to spend money on the cycles.  That's okay with me -
it's charity.  But, if I pay a dollar for a remailer, I can expect
to be able to use a very strong key.

A good pricing strategy for remailers would be to charge, say, $1 for
instant delivery, $.50 for 30 minute delivery, etc.  To generate
interest, 4 hour delays could be imposed for free remailing, if the
resources are available.

Peter Hendrickson
ph@netcom.com