future existence of free remailers?

[Jonathan Rochkind <jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu>]

People often like to postulate on the list that eventually there won't
be any more of these philantropic free remailers, and people will be charging
small amounts for every remailed message, to make some money off it.
 
I've thought of a pretty good reason why this might not ever happen. 
Hal Finney (or maybe it was Jim Dixon. Probably both) recently realizd
and revealed to us that if one operates a remailer oneself, you effectively
hide your identity from even the _first_ remailer on your chain, because
it doesn't know if the mesage is in fact from _you_, or from someone using
your remailer. In practice, simply having some remailer software running
that no one other then you uses wont' work. You've got to have a busy 
remailer running with lots of traffic coming in as well as going out.
 
This means that if someone wants to send secure anonymous mail using remailers,
it's in his best interest to operate a remailer himself, and to try
and get as many people to use it as possible. So philanthropy or profit
aren' the only reasons to run a remailer; one's primary reason might be
to ensure oneself anonymity. You could try to get some profit out of it too,
but the more people who use your remailer, the better for you, so it's in your
interest to make it free so many people will use it. This motivation could
provide us with lots of free remailers for years to come. Maybe. It's
an interesting thing to think about, anyhow.