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0 pointsDocTomoe5y ago0 comments

I would argue that postal remailing exposes the remailer to legal risk, and (if done with few remailers) gives the surveillers few points of particularly interesting mail hubs.

If anything, postal remailing would probably only work in a TOR-like manner, with many, distributed, non-for-profit remailers - but that opens a whole set of new problems, like who pays for the service, what prevents the remailer to just take the delivery for themselves (as undoubtedly such a service would be used to remail illicit substances and other valuables), and how would such a network of legitimate, trustworthy remailers know each other to do some tunnelling?

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dredmorbius5y ago

There are numerous potential issues, yes, though some provisos (e.g., no detectable traces of illicit substances, limited to standard envelope-sized postage) would tend to limit much of that.

Even as an informal practice, the option could have some value. The question of whether to used a two-hop (source, mix, recepient) or three-hop (source, mix-1, mix-2, recipient, as with Tor) exists (the three hop system would triple postage, if messages were sent individually, though bulk distribution is another option, with break-bulk at the 1st or 2nd hop).

Again, what has surprised me previously is that I'd found no mention of the concept at all. Though I am finding several now, specifically emphasizing anonymity / location obscuring:

https://rapidremailer.com/

https://postmarkhere.com/

https://www.usa2me.com/

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