For anyone who wants it, I have an email server that I can set addresses up that would forward to your personal account so that your email could still remain confidential. And not being in the game means you don't have to worry about me cheating and forwarding it to myself as well.

I still worry about you cheating in all the games you're not even in. And when I write an exam at school, I think "Draugnar is probably cheating this right now". It's also why I can't keep a partner.

I'd do it, though I'm not sure if I'm still welcome in dub's games. I understand either way. :-)

hmmm...shaky shit there drauggy....id rather stick to the personal email...or perhaps we get a mediator to handle the mail?

It takes like 10 minutes (high end) to set up a free email account on one of a billion services out there....yahoo, hotmail, rocketmail, gmail, blah blah blah. What's the problem?

That's what I'm offering to be is mediator. I'm not playing.

Draug beith the mediator, we must find more sexy folks to play! *takes off shirt*...awww fuck im out of shape.... T_T *puts shirt back on*

An additional possibility with a real moderator is true "grey" press that allows you to pretend to be someone else. If you can imitate their handwriting, you can be them.

You might consider setting up email accounts per country
austria@
france@
etc
Then you could have it anonymous and have the judge send out the passwords to the players based on what country they received.

And I think Draugnar is on to something. All messages regardless of medium could be sent to the judge with a "please forward to X". My favourite part of postal dip (real PBM) was researching the handwriting, stationery, etc and applying some counter intelligence to fool enemies and perform stabs. Then you get into sending stuff in code and it can get really awesome. Adds a lot of realism to the game, sense you can't always verify messages from your allies in real diplomacy. =P

That's an extra level of skill. I can't even imitate my own handwriting. I'm all for having a moderator and anonymous e-mail addresses! The point, krellin, is that Draugnar is offering to forward to our usual e-mails so we don't have to check our fake one all the time.

If all communication went through the judge, you wouldn't need specialised accounts as long as no other player directly communicated to each other.

Oh, and I guess I'm in. I'll sort my shit out.

Yes, but I think the espionage portion is what sets PBM apart from the rest of Diplomacy. If you've never done it, I highly recommend it. Somewhere in storage, I have a giant stack of letters and postcards from a group I played with when I was living overseas. Arguably the best game of Diplomacy I've ever had the fortune of participating in.

Sounds like a lot of work for the judge. Unless of course you could set up an e-mail forwarding system Draug, where I e-mail you and put "Austria" or "global" etc. in the subject, and it automatically forwards to that address with GameMasterDraug as sender. Then we could get some real espionage going.

And using normal e-mail accounts would give all kinds of extra options, such as cc's (great for alliances) or bcc's (great for backstabs). Not sure if you would want that. Also, the sendfrom address can be easily faked.

Right. Filters could easily be set up in gmail.

Can gmail accounts be set up to automatically forward received mail by subject? I haven't played around with gmail really, I have no idea how powerful it is. Could it do combinations too, like writing "austria+italy" in the subject field so that both get it and can see that they have received the same message? Or "all-germany" "Let's kill that leader son of a bitch"

You know, there are services for this already. Why not use DPJudge?

http://www.diplom.org/Email/newbie.html
http://www.floc.net/dpjudge/

(I guess that would kind of kill representing the game as a webdip game -- never mind).

There is nothing wrong with using webdip to get the players together, even if it is eventually played somewhere else.

Semck, you're welcome in my games. Just not pacifist anymore. =P

I'll read through this thread again later when I have more time. On the brief pass, these are good ideas. And interesting note on the espionage!

I can set the mail server to take any incoming message to a given account ([email protected] for instance) and forward it with a generic reply to and from address.

And forget about GMail. I own draugnar.com and have complete control over it. I would just make redirects on each of the game accounts.

Well, it's up to dubmdell. But I like the idea of anonymous e-mail forwarding.

I do as well.

I will go ahead and setup the emails but set them to forward to me for now.

I will alsobset one up for global that will forward to everyone as well.

You realise you can point your domain to Google Apps right? There's no better mail client than gmail, regardless of how much control you require. Google doesn't have to actually hold anything, you just use their features.

@Geo - Google's mail client, sure. But I would argue that my mail *server* gives me more control as an *admin* than Google would ever let a non-admin user have.