Remailers Sharing Machine or Operator

This is something that occurs occasionally that should be explained. Sometimes a remailer operator has the resources to run more than one remailer. There's nothing wrong with this, but if those remailers happened to be owned by TLA, that's a different matter. It could be bad if your random remailer chain was to end up with more than one of those remailers.  Because of this, QSL takes the step necessary to allow only one from those shared to be included per chain.

You can see for yourself what machines share owners. This is just an example and may not be a real world. In the mlist.txt stats page you'll find a section like this:

Groups of remailers sharing a machine or operator:
(banana hsub slow)
(fotonl1 fotoro1)

So, banana, hsub and slow all belong to the same operator. Also, fotonl1 and fotoro1 are owned by a single operator, but that operator is not the same as the banana group.

Prior to sending the message, QSL goes through each of the groups listed, picking a single remailer randomly to allow for use in that chain. It doesn't pick a remailer for the chain. It just allows that remailer to be randomly selected while it's siblings are not. One thing to note: prior to randomly selecting the remailer QSL loads the list of barred remailers and if any of the sharing remailers is barred, it removes that remailer from consideration before selecting randomly from those remaining. This insures that the choice is limited to active remailers.