Re: encouraging digital pseudonyms

["Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>]

At 03:16 AM 9/22/97 -0700, Wei Dai wrote:
>When I see a piece of email sent to the cypherpunks list
>from an anonymous remailer, I typically delete it without reading, because
>there is no easy way to tell between anynoymous email (which are typically
>junk) and pseudonymous email, and there is no easy way to filter by
>pseudonym.

Perhaps I am missing something here.  I find it easy to distinguish type-I
anonymous traffic from nym mail.  Anonymous mail usually comes from an
address like 'anon@' or 'nobody@' while pseudonymous mail will come from a
pseudonym.

A pseudonym is almost indistinguishable from a regular email address.  The
only way you can tell is if your know the domain is a remailer domain.
Since there are very few stable nymservers in the world, it should not be
hard to filter for all of the stable nyms individually.  If I was looking
or a generic way to filter out from all anonymous mail from the 3 to 12
nyms (depending on how you count) on the same domains, I'd look for the
word "anonymous" in the from field.

I successfully filter all anonymous mail I receive, but I assign it a color
rather than rejecting anonymous mail.

  -- Robert Costner                  Phone: (770) 512-8746
     Electronic Frontiers Georgia    mailto:pooh@efga.org  
     http://www.efga.org/            run PGP 5.0 for my public key