[Mailman-Developers] Same/different fake ids for every thread in an anonymous list

[Rashi Karanpuria]

> It would help in assessing "sensible" if you would say which ones you
> prefer and why.

I think the well suited hierarchy of options may be:

1) New fake_id for each post: In my opinion this approach won't be able to
establish the basic trust needed for the conversation to flow. eg.I
queried something to mr. A on mailing list and he replies it with id B.
And it won't allow replying mechanism to work easily as we will have to
store multiple id's for each user at a time. This will considerably
increase the database requirement

2) New fake_id for each Thread: This approach aims at maintaining the
conversation flow when a person is talking on a particular topic. Drawback
is the user wishes he can't change his user name during a thread (although
that can be spoofed)

3)New fake_id for each list: It is quite a compromise over the small
amount of security we are aiming to provide by this feature. As it makes
the user more traceable then in above approach case. For eg. I don't want
my company to hunt a single fake id and find me out, if the secrets were
exposed from different addresses they would be more anonymous and there
would be no proof if a single person did that or many.

4)Same fake_id for all lists: It sounds like maintaining a dictionary each
user and her corresponding fake name but again it makes the user more
traceable as in the above case.

>  Plus a couple of
> different dimensions: change ids if posting from different IPs, and
> change IPs' at intervals of time.  I'm not sure which of those (and
> their combinations) make sense.

I plan to clean out the headers and leave no trace about the IP the mail
came from. Also For eg abcd at example.com posts a mail on list I pose him as
xyz at list_name.com where xyz will be randomly generated id.
So I don't think there is a need to change IP address each time

I am more inclined towards no. (2) mentioned above, because it seemed to
me most sensible on the anonymous list feature I plan to implement.

> Finally, I suspect that different list owners will have different
> preferences, as will different subscribers.  The same individuals
> might even have different preferences depending on list.
But then we can't satisfy every need ;) we can only implement the most
general case.
Please correct and guide me further.

Regards
Rashi