Instant Messaging Standards that Avoid SPAM?

nazgul@somewhere.com asks: "There are a number of proposed instant messaging standards under development, but I haven't seen any articles discussing how these standards plan to avoid spam. AOL's IM protocol actually has what I consider to be a pretty useful feature. You can 'warn' anybody who sends you a message, once per message they send you. The more warnings they get, the slower their messages get sent, until they can't send anything at all. What are the new IM proposals planning to do about SPAM? Because if we switch to a standard that doesn't have builtin SPAM protection, that standard will be useless." What kinds of privacy features do you think should be built into chatting protocols and programs of tomorrow? What chatting services and programs suffer from a lack of protection from Messaging SPAM?

"On AIM, everyone can see somebody's warning level, and warnings gradually wear off. Of course the warning mechanism depends on several assumptions.

1. There are no rogue message servers.
2. Creating an account requires a valid mail address.

The latter could be fairly easily defeated by building a large enough cache of accounts, and then rotating through them, but it would be difficult. The former can be defeated if we move to a multi-server instant messaging network."

Most chat services have built in protections for annoying users. Chat programs also may have some way of dropping traffic from unwanted users. For example, most IRC clients can use the /IGNORE command to drop what traffic they don't want from specific users. I'm sure that such functionality will be built into future chatting systems.

Comments

Current IM can't support the future

[Twylite]

Most IM systems under development could be extended to avoid spam without too much trouble. The problem is that these systems all use a centralised server/service, making your communication reliant on a single service, organisation, addressing system, whatever.

We have a perfectly valid architecture for messaging ... its called e-mail. Why aren't we extending e-mail servers to handle instant messaging (IAMOF SMTP already has IM capabilities of sorts in the SOML and SAML commands).

Its about time people thought of integration and simplification, rather than running off and writing newer and more complex protocols to force yet another icon/program onto my already cluttered desktop.