Tools/Barred remailers...
There may come a time when you wish to block or bar a remailer from use in your randomly selected mixmaster chains. There are a few reasons you may come to this conclusion.
Proven Unreliability
Sometimes, remailer stats reports don't tell the whole story. In mlist.txt, remailer A may have excellent stats. It may also show that it is not part of any broken chains. Still, everytime you use remailer A, your mail fails to be delivered. In this situation, you can bar that remailer from use in your randomly selected chains.
On the other hand, the stats may show remailer A to be functional but simply not enough to be considered useful. Mlist.txt is a snapshot in time. At any given time mixmaster has only one mlist.txt to analyse. Flaky reliability may not always be obvious to the program. This is another case where barring a remailer can provide relief from failed message delivery.
Disagreement with Management Practices
In time, you may become familiar with the remailers in the remailer network. If you follow the newsgroup alt.privacy.anon-server you can learn much about the remailers and the people who run them. Not all remailers are run by exactly the same standards. Each operator decides just what is considered abuse and how much abuse will be allowed. One factor that is always a consideration with remailer operators is the fact that one man's abuse is another man's free speech--and vice versa. It is entirely possible that you may decide you disagree with an operator's management standards. If you don't want to use a remailer because you don't agree with the operators practices, you can bar that remailer from use and forget it.
Tick Unwanted Remailers
It's a simple process to bar any remailer from selection by mixmaster. Just tick the box next to the remailer in the Barred Remailers Dialog. You might want to start with the remailer named slow--if it still exists when you read this. Slow was setup specifically to have a very long latency time. All remailers hold messages for a short random time to foil traffic analysis. Slow, on the other hand, holds the message much longer--approx one hour at the time I write this. You can check for yourself in the Latency column of mlist.txt. Click View/mlist.txt.
Slow is a good remailer. The decision to bar need not reflect badly on it's operator. It's just represents a desire for a somewhat faster delivery time. This might be especially useful to brand new users sending test messages, where the extra latency may prove frustrating and lead the sender to think the message failed.