Re: How secure is SSL emails?

From: Guy Macon (http://www.guymacon.com)
Date: 06/29/04 

Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 01:41:08 -0700

Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de> says...
>
>BTW, I like to take this opportunity to re-cite what Fairbrother
>wrote which I think is a fair/good opinion towards [current]
>remailers:
>
> I am not claiming that remailers are useless. Just that they
> aren't very useful, and their existence and the general
> perception of them encourages misuse by the ignorant.

This raises the question "useful for what purpose?" They have
certainly proved useful to those who wish to post to Usenet
without revealing who they are. I have never seen any such post
be traced back through the Mixmaster network. They have certainly
proved useful in the fight against Sciento1ogy. They proved
useful when I was designing a system that split up a secret and
sent it via various paths in such a way that an attacker would have
to intercept them all to derive the entire key. They are useful
when I report a spammer but am not sure whether the spammer controls
the abuse reporting address.

I would be very interested in reading a lists of situations where
remailers aren't very useful, with a rough guess as to what percentage
of users fit the situation described.

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