Anonymous e-mail?

Anonymous e-mail?

Posted Dec 18, 2003 18:06 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Anonymous e-mail? by tonnesen
Parent article: Spam-proofing the mail system

Anonymous email would still be possible under the SPF system, at least,
by simply permitting mail from hosts that don't claim to be anyone in
particular. Such email wouldn't be verified at all, since it didn't claim
to be anything in particular. Most people would just throw it away, but
anonymous tip lines wouldn't (since they wouldn't get anything else,
obviously), and spammers wouldn't tend to spam such addresses anyway (do
spammers really want to reach investigative reporters at their work?).

Furthermore, if people are actually using an anonymizing network, the
email will come out with a perfectly valid and legitimate address which
simply can't be tracked back to the sender, and is authenticated as being
an anonymous message from this remailer. These systems are generally
pseudonymous, in any case, so that the original sender can send
additional messages authentically, and these systems would merely
authenticate the pseudonym. Again, this mail would be filtered by most
people, but would get through to people who intend to pick up anonymous
tips.

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