[Remops] Opt-in for emails. A few comments

[Eelbash Admin]

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I've been running eelbash as opt-in for emails for several days and
noticed a few things which might be of interest.

The way exit emails to civilians are handled is to send the first email,
but include a disclaimer that explains it will be the last email he
receives, unless he opts in by replying and including the confirmation
code in the subject line.

Spam email is filtered out. It rarely gets through the remailer.

So far, about 50 emails going to civilians have been received. Of those
50 recipients, guess how many people have opted-in? One.

I interpret that to mean that people are indifferent, at best, to email
that is sent to them through remailers, and makes me think that the opt-in
idea is a good one.

Two potential problems have been pointed out: LEA not receiving criminal
threats, thereby unable to head them off, and the variety of possible
emails making it impossible for everyone to opt-in.

I don't see the first one as much of a problem. If the LEA doesn't check
its email for bomb threats and so on, it's not doing its job. If that's
too simplistic a way to look at it, maybe some sort of tweaking can be
done; maybe send a couple of emails before putting in the block.

The second problem, of the variety of possible emails, hasn't caused a
problem yet and I can't see how it can, but maybe there is some address
out there that will gum up the works.

I don't see how emails going to a public address, such as a mailing list,
will cause a problem, since the confirmation code is in the subject line
of the first email, and anyone can send a reply using the public address
of the mailing list, or whatever it is, as the 'from' address, and
thereby opt-in. But who knows?

What I've had to do is to whitelist, using regex, certain essential
addresses that should never get the disclaimer or be added to the
blocklist. A periodic check of the existing blocklist is enough to see if
an address is blocked that should not be, and the whitelist can then be
adjusted.

I haven't had to make any changes yet, but the question is still there of
how much maintenance the operator will want to do.

Personally, after seeing how little interest people have in receiving
emails through the remailer - that was an eye-opener, and considering how
unpleasant it can be for them to receive threats or insults through the
remailer, and how bomb threats and the like can cause problems for the
remailer to the point of it being shut down, I don't mind doing a little
maintenance; but others may feel differently.
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