Subject: Using the alt.personals Anonymous Contact Service Newsgroups: alt.personals From: ap.admin@hri.com Distribution: world Followup-To: alt.personals Organization: Anonymous Contact Service @ HRI Reply-To: ap.admin@hri.com INTRODUCTION TO THE ALT.PERSONALS ANONYMOUS POSTING AND CONTACT SERVICE Last update: Aug. 15, 1991 Alt.personals is a newsgroup for posting personal messages, somewhat like the personals sections of newspapers and magazines. It is not moderated. In order to provide anonymity for those who wish it, an automated anonymous contact service has been provided to allow anonymous posting to alt.personals. This system consists of an anonymous posting service and a double-blind e-mail forwarding service, so that replies to anonymous posts will also be anonymous. There are essentially no restrictions on what can be posted via the anonymous posting service, except that I'll cancel any articles that are criminal in nature (offers to sell or buy drugs or sexual services, soliciting sex with minors, stolen credit card numbers, etc.) I just don't feel like getting busted for aiding and abetting this week. NOTE: Throughout this article, I provide e-mail addresses in Internet form - someone@hri.com. If your mailer can't handle this type of address, you can use uucp "bang-path" addresses: ...!uunet!hri.com!someone. You'll have to figure out how to get e-mail to uunet on your own, but it's reachable from most places in the Solar System. Ask your local e-mail guru. HOW TO POST AN ARTICLE ANONYMOUSLY ** Send e-mail message to To post to: ** ---------------------------------------------------------- ** ap.post@hri.com All the World The Subject: line of this message will become the Subject: line of the article. A new header will be created for the article, with From: and Reply-To: lines of the form "ap.123@hri.com". Nothing in the header of the article will tell anything about who or where you are. If your message has a signature in the standard form (beginning with a line containing "--"), it will be deleted. There is no enforced limit to the length of a message, however, abuse of this will be dealt with severely. Keep your message under 30 lines. NOTE: The first time you send something to the ACS, be it a posting or a reply to a posting, you are assigned an alias of the form ap.[1-9999]@hri.com. As long as your From: line contains the same information when it gets here, anything you post or e-mail will appear to come from this alias. If you send something that has a different line in From:, you will be assigned a new alias. This includes mail sent from the same person but happened to go through a different path to get to hri.com. Both aliases will work. This may be a bug or a feature, depending on your point of view. You can give yourself a nickname by including a line like: ACS-Name: My nickname in the first message (ping, post or reply) you send to the ACS service. This is intended to make it easier for people who read your messages to remember who you are. ACS-Name: must be at the beginning of the line. Anything after the ':' and one space will be your nickname. Suggestions For Anonymous Posting 1) The Subject: line of your article, in addition to giving some hint about why you posted it, should give information about the geographic area you're in, or interested in hearing from people from. (Interesting syntax, there.) This allows people who aren't in that area to bypass the article without wasting a lot of time. 2) Don't include phone numbers, street addresses, or e-mail addresses in the body of the article. It sort of defeats the point of anonymous posting, doesn't it? If your mailer automatically inserts such information about you anywhere but in a properly formatted signature, get it fixed. 3) PLEASE don't post anonymous test messages to alt.personals just to find out what your alias would be if you posted a "real" personal. Send a message to ap.ping (see below) instead. These are suggestions. Not guidelines, not rules, not laws. You can put anything you want in an article. It's your life. REPLYING TO ANONYMOUS ARTICLES Just reply to an anonymous article as you would to any other posting or send e-mail to the alias listed in the From: line of the article. The message will be e-mailed to the poster's alias at hri.com. When it gets here, the software will intercept the message, substitute your e-mail address with an alias, replace the poster's alias with their real e-mail address, and send it on with a completely rebuilt header, no signature. There is no enforced limit to the length of replies either, but abuses will be dealt with severely. Keep your message under 30 lines. At this point, it's possible for any two people whose aliases are registered in the database here to carry on an e-mail conversation without ever knowing each other's e-mail address. Just send your message to the alias at hri.com, and the system will do the rest. If the message lengths are too high, a limit of 25 lines per message (posting or reply) will be enforced. WHAT IF MY SITE DOESN'T CARRY ALT.PERSONALS You can still post your personal article as outlined above and receive anonymous replies, but you can't read anyone else's postings. I have no intention of creating a mailing list or a server to provide the articles to those who don't get alt.personals. If someone else wants to set up such a system, they're welcome to. PRIVACY AND SECURITY I've done what I can to ensure that the identities of the users of the Anonymous Contact Service will be kept private, but I can't make any guarantees. I will not divulge the name of anyone using the service without a court order, but there is always the possibility that someone will successfully crack my system, or that someone will examine your article before it gets here. Usenet is not totally private, and you use this service at your own risk. One of the things that happens fairly frequently on the net is bounced e-mail. It could be unpleasant if this happened to a message destined for the ACS. To make sure that you have a clean mail path, you can send e-mail to "ap.ping@hri.com". This is a mail echo system. When your message gets here (if it gets here), the system will grab your return address and send you an e-mail message containing your alias in the ACS system and the header of your message as it arrived here. If you don't get a reply with a Subject: line of "ACS ping reply", assume that either your message never got here, or the reply went astray. In either case, you shouldn't try to use the anonymous posting service. Try to find another e-mail path that works first. ADMINISTRIVIA If you need to get in touch with a human being about problems with the ACS system, send e-mail to "ap.admin@hri.com". In particular, if you need to have your alias removed from the database or your e-mail address has changed, you need to send e-mail to ap.admin. Eventually, these capabilities will be automated, once I figure out to do it securely. If, for some reason, you want to cancel an article you've posted, the only way to do it (unless you're a superuser) is to send e-mail to ap.admin@hri.com and ask for it to be cancelled. This is another item that may be automated someday. In almost all cases however, cancel requests cannot be honored. Your article will probably have gotten to hundreds of sites before I ever see your e-mail request. There is no way for me to cancel e-mail you've sent to an alias, so don't even bother asking. -- To correspond with the ACS administrator, send EMAIL to: ap.admin@hri.com (non anonymous mail) ap.0@hri.com (anonymous mail with no replies) uunet!hri.com!{ap.admin,ap.0} -- To use this service, send EMAIL to: Anonymous posting: ap.post@hri.com Anonymous reply: @hri.com Test path/get alias: ap.ping@hri.com ACS administrator: ap.admin@hri.com