>>> Good point, but the mail service including spam filtering is hard to
>>> beat. As for privacy, I have a plan. It's a little program that does
>>> random Google searches to ensure that the profile they have is not of
>>> me.

>> Yes, although in the context of the original question, I didn't think
>> spam would be an issue. The OP never came back to us to tell us why he
>> wanted anonymity but lets suppose he's a political activist or
>> dissident (which can be either a freedom fighter or a terrorist
>> depending on who owns the news station) and needs to set up a way of
>> communicating with his colleagues without his messages being scanned
>> by a state-run email monitoring system looking for keywords. So in
>> that scenario I'd be guessing the two correpsondents would have picked
>> unlikely email addresses and never publicised them anywhere since they
>> want to stay off the radar as much as possible, don't want to
>> accidentally get it linked via cookie to their facebook page or
>> anything like that. They'd also be looking for webmail services in
>> other countries to their own so that, should their email addresses
>> fall into the hands of the watchers, the watchers cannot so easily go
>> to the webmail provider with a court order demanding identity info.

>> However, if you decide to use Hushmail, for example, then it might be
>> that this is itself of interest to the watchers who will undoubtedly
>> take the attitude "If they have nothing to hide then why are they
>> using hushmail?" flawed as that argument is, so it may be better for
>> correspondents to use a very popular service like Gmail which will not
>> arouse suspicion, offers moderate anonymity, and which allows them to
>> hide their sensitive messages in pictures etc.

>The main reason I suggested that there be means of truly ananymous
>communications available to everybody was given in the first sentence
>of my OP. I myself don't have currently, and also don't hope to have
>in any near future, any need of anonymous communications. But I am
>as a principle opposed to the governments' limiting the freedom of
>common people on the questionable grounds that the communication of
>(the comparatively negligible small number of) certain criminals of
>the common type or some non-conformists of the ruling parties of the
>governments are done using phones or the Internet just in the 'same'
>way like the common people. (Should drinking of water be unter
>control/limitation as well just because some bad guys also drink
>water??) That's why my proposal to (if it's successful in practice)
>demontrate the fundamental nonsense of limiting the freedom of common
>people in such manners.

>Once again I like to say that I am happy to learn the informations
>given in the diverse follow-ups. BTW, I learnt elsewhere that there
>is a usenet group alt.anonymous.messages and found that there exist
>evidently already some communications there via encrypted messages.
>I think that one problem there could be that any third party could
>post under the same pseudonym that one is using. While with proper
>message authentication codes the bogus messages could be identified,
>there could however under circumstances IMHO be an non-trivial issue
>of how to adequately/conveniently filter in order to read the proper
>messages. With a webpage of the kind I proposed, where a password
>is needed to post, this deficiency could hardly ever arise (assuming
>that the password system is intact and that the provider is a good guy).

>M. K. Shen