[Remops] Suggestion for dest-block

Len Sassaman rabbi at abditum.com
Fri Dec 8 16:48:43 GMT 2006


Eelbash Admin wrote:

> Nobody interested in this suggestion? I'd do it myself if I had the
> skills to code forms on a web page. Sure, the user will have to reply to
> a half dozen confirm emails, but if somebody is being stalked, etc.,
> he'll probably be willing to do it. It's a hell of a lot easier than him
> contacting half a dozen remailers.

Actually, this has been done before. For a long time, users could submit
their email addresses to the Paracrypt Remailer Abuse Blocklist, and
remops who configured their systems to use it could fetch the rab.blk, and
mail to those email addresses would not be delivered.

(We added support for a second, read-only blocklist sometime in the 2.9
beta days.)

Unfortunately, the Paracrypt service is offline now, and as far as I know,
no one operates a replacement service. Support for a Remailer Abuse
Blocklist still exists in Mixmaster, though, if someone were to offer such
a service again. The file should be named rab.txt, and contain
newline-delimited lists of email addresses. Checking should be performed
on the submission site to ensure that regular expressions and other
potentially dangerous input isn't added to the list.

Ideally a challenge/response protocol sent to the email address in
question would be employed, to prevent people from blocking mail destined
for third-parties who do wish to receive it. Note that this avoids the
need for the user to respond to "half a dozen emails", since the
destination requests aren't sent to the remailers, but instead the
remailers fetch the block list. The confirmation email is sent back to the
RAB site.

Support for this would be trivial to implement in Reliable as well -- all
you need to do is add the ability for Reliable to check two
"destination-block"  files, the second of which is the RAB file, which
never gets written to.



More information about the Remops mailing list