Mon, 22 Feb 1993 22:07:10 +0100
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But the original question was not about privacy and encryption. If you
are going to discuss an issue which for some reason requires a good
measure of confidentiality on a mailing list, the issue is not keeping
the discussion within the list confidential but preventing normal users
from finding out who is posting what, who is on the list, and so on. I
don't see how encrypting the text could help, and the PEM business
doesn't encrypt the headers.
It all depends on the degree of security you need. Listening to Internet
lines is pretty easy, so if you're worried about people with that kind of
approach you just can't use the Internet to discuss such issues, because
it isn't a safe network. Again, encryption will not help as it isn't the
text which is confidential, but the name of the person who sent it. While
mail headers can be forged easily (this time with a good reason), it
would still be possible for someone with enough determination to trace
the forgery to the host that did it, unless it were done really very
professionally (and we wouldn't want such high-quality forging tools
available to the masses with a nice click-and-forge interface, would
we?). If you can trust people, computers and lines at your site, you can
arrange for the anonymous mapping to be performed there and hackers can
listen all they want to the backbone lines. On the other hand, I'm pretty
sure that if you fill up one of these anonymous mailboxes you will sooner
or later get a message back from a mail daemon saying "imail: unknown
imail error -22987437" with the actual address in it ;-)
If on the other hand your concern is that your name and address would
show on the list, there are anonymous servers for that.
Eric
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