> Someone wants to be able to post to my e-mail discussion list
> anonymously. Lives literally depend on this person being able
> to keep his/her identity anonymous when posting. I know the
> lowest-tech answer would simply be for this person to send
> posts via me and then for me to strip identifying information
> (headers etc.) before forwarding to the list. But given how
> much is at risk if I were to ever make a stupid
> human error by hitting the wrong button or something, as you
> can imagine I want to eliminate human error from the process
> as much as possible. I know nothing can be 100 percent fool-proof,
> but I want something as close to it as possible.
The most reasonable solution is a Web mail account, such as
iName (mail.com), usa.net, HotMail, or a dozen others. Some,
perhaps most, of these, send the sender's IP address as a field
in the header; depending on how the user gets Web service, that
may or may not provide useful identifying information.
AltaVista free mail (altavista.iname.com) provides Web mail service
that does NOT send the originating IP address with the message.
Of course, it is known to iname.com, but someone would have to
get it from them by legal process or a break-in, and then, as above,
it may not provide identifying information.
The value of the client IP address is less if the user comes from
a large site with a Web proxy (e.g., AOL), or uses an intermediate
proxy site like anonymizer.com.
This used to be a big issue for lists and list maintainers, but
is pretty much moot since the era of free Web mail services.
--
Michael C. Berch
[EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
