Introduction

The Cypherpunks mailing list is a mailing list for discussing cryptography and its effect on society. It is not a moderated list and the list operators are not responsible for the list content.

Cypherpunks is a distributed mailing list. A subscriber can subscribe to one node of the list and thereby participate on the full list. Each node (called a Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer [CDR], although they are not related to anonymous remailers) exchanges messages with the other nodes in addition to sending messages to its subscribers. A message posted to one node will be received by the list subscribers on the other nodes, and vice-versa.

The various CDRs follow different policies on filtering spam and to a lesser extent on modifying messages that go to/from their subscribers. Filtering is done, on nodes that do it, to reduce the huge amount of spam that the cypherpunks list is subjected to.

How to Subscribe

We use and recommend the LNE node of the Cypherpunks mailing list. LNE filters out the copious amount of spam that is forwarded by many other CDR nodes. To subscribe to the Cypherpunks mailing list, simply click here or send email with the subject "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo@lne.com

Anonymous Posting

Cypherpunks encourage anonymous posting. See cypherpunks' Remailer <TBD> section for more information on how to send email using an anonymous remailer.

List Archive

An archive of the Cypherpunks mailing list is available at inet-one http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks. This site archives a raw feed of the CDR, including all the spam. A spam-filtered mailing list archive is unfortunately not yet available.

Net.loons

As is the case with many mailing lists, a very small percentage of the Cypherpunks mailing list consists of posters that fail to instill into the reader a desire to expend one's limited time on reading that person's posts. Unlike with many other lists, this small number of Cypherpunks subscribers tends to generate a large percentage of the posts to the list.

Many have found that by filtering just a few posters, the list becomes imminently more readable, enjoyable, and useful.

If you are using UNIX procmail, a sample procmail recipe is included below. Other mail readers offer similar filtering capabilities that you may wish to explore. Of course only you can and should decide which filtering rules, if any, match your interests and time budget.

# sample .procmailrc
#
# mailing lists:
# filter all cypherpunks mail into its own cypherpunks-l folder,
# discarding mail from loons. All CDRs set their From: line
# to 'owner-cypherpunks'. # /dev/null is unix for the trash can.
#
:0
* ^From.*owner-cypherpunks@.*
{
:0:
* (^From:.*ravage@ssz\.com.*|\
^From:.*jchoate@dev.tivoli.com.*|\
^From:.*mattd@useoz.com|\
^From:.*proffr11@bigpond.com|\
^From:.*jei@cc.hut.fi)
/dev/null

:0:
cypherpunks-l
}

Additional Information

For a complete list of CDR nodes in operation and additional information about the LNE Cypherpunks node, visit the LNE CDR website.

Credits

We thank the LNE CDR maintainer much of the above.