Slashdot Mirror
Email (As We Know It) Doomed?
Mephie writes "A pretty interesting article at Slate.com takes a look at how spam may be killing email as we know it. With the increase of spam, the argument is made that more users will switch from blacklisting spammers to 'whitelisting' specific, trusted addresses, making email more like instant messaging: if you're not on someone's 'buddy list,' you have to prove you're an actual person (e.g. identify a word in an image) to send a message." May be?
Right now, my email box gets about 30 spams a day. I almost never receive legitimate email anymore.
.. Email is just becoming outdated as a method of communication, funny how fast that happened. Spam didn't help though, that's for sure.
Additionally, I find that email communication is too slow, which is ironic since its so much more efficient than the old way everyone used to communicate by post.
Instant messaging clients have more than replaced email for me. They can do everything email clients can do, without spam.
Email will always have a place of course, like websites will need email addresses for contacts, and other such things. But for person to person communication, instant messaging clients are much easier to use
Tolerate no spamming what so ever. If one complain about a customer with an proven case of spam would arrive at a abuse department, shut that account down. There is no need to allow this, and no need to "warn" users doing this.
My ISP limits me from commersial activities at my homepage, why not limit the e-mail account from spamming.
The biggest problem today is that the price of spam is not charged from the spammer, but the poor user who recieves the shit. For all you americans out there, sue a spammer, make him/her pay for all loss of productivity he/she has caused. It'll make you rich, and perhaps make spammers think twice before clicking that send button.
Previously bayesian spam filtering was demonstrated on slashdot to be very effective. Once this becomes commonplace, and seamless, no extra configuration required on the users behalf, hopefully we will see the end of spam.
However, combined with whitelists this could be quite useful. Bayesian filters to filter out spam, except for whitelisted spam. Eg mailing lists of advertisements you sign up to being whitelisted could be effectively. I suppose that when you sign up to a mailing list that would normally be recognised as spam, when it sends a confirmation e-mail your client could recognise it and ask if you want to add it to your whitelist.
Anyway, with the introduction of bayesian filters into an ordinary client means that the future of e-mail may not necessarily have to be so bleak.
The worse spam gets, the more people will look to alternatives. Maybe it's time to set up some infrastructure for Internet Mail 2000.
If one complain about a customer with an proven case of spam would arrive at a abuse department, shut that account down.
I don't think it's quite as easy as that. If one customer using my laptop gateway sends a spam from my IP address, is that the end of my cybercafe? If one angry employee at IBM sets off a spamming program as he walks out the door, does IBM vanish from the Internet?
A while back our server got blacklisted for a week or so by SPEW because it was in the same 16-bit IP range as a machine that has been used for spam. That's potentially 65k machines! It was at this point that I vowed not to co-operate with any of these anti-spam measures, which inevitably martyr innocent users at random and don't touch the big spammers with the resources to change IP address and ISP three times a day if necessary. The cure is worse than the original disease!
Virtually serving coffee
os x's default email app, mail, seems to toss spam directly into the trash with (about) 99% accuracy... that is, 99% of spam is correctly identified as spam. perhaps twice i've found emails that i've wanted to receive in the trash, but that's over many months, and the mistakes will never be repeated after a quick "whitelisting".
anyway, if you're really upset by spam, it's pretty friggin' easy to avoid it... do NOT put down your regular email address for any site that wants to email you a password for registration. get a trashy hotmail account (or whatever) just for verifications, and use your regular email addresss for real communication.
perhaps spam, collectively, is a huge problem, but the problems it causes for typical individuals are small, especially given the existence of spam filters. that's why spam won't "kill" email by any measure.
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I had spam yesterday where they spelt Viagra wrong. Unless Viagrea is a new wonder drug?
Not funny at all. You knew what they meant; a filter on your inbox on the keyword 'Viagra' wouldn't have. Someone I know once worked on software to do realtime filtering of keywords in "family friendly" chatrooms. He said it was almost impossible; a human's ability to communicate FUCK without out actually typing it was far ahead of any rules he could encode into his software without breaking legitimate conversations. That's one of the reasons the spam problem is so difficult to solve purely with technology.
This wouldn't happen. Anyone who lives in the EU: check your emails - are any sent from EU nations? NO. If the US would stop this stupid insistence on your personal details being everyone else's property but your own - then we wouldn't have to put up with so much sh*te being sent to our inbox about mortgages on another continent. I hope the EU goes through with the (jokey) threat to find and list the names of the people breaking the law - so if they ever take a holiday to Paris, we can be waiting.
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
Let's think outside the (mail)box for a second.
Imagine a system where only whitelisted e-mail with a confirmed return address gets through. That would be enough to kill spam. The problem is, how can we allow previously unknown people to get on this whitelist without human intervention and gray/blacklists. Complicated? Not necessarily.
Here's the idea: suppose that we have a certifying service attached to our e-mail address. Say, my e-mail address is me@foo.com and my certifying address is certify.me@foo.com. Now I would want to send e-mail to you@bar.com but you do not know me and you are using a whitelist. No problem. I send you an electronically signed e-mail, and my mailing program, upon deciding that you are not already on my buddy list, cc:s the message (or relevant parts of it) to certify.me@foo.com. When your program receives my message and checks that I am not on your buddy list, it sends a signed query to certify.me@foo.com. The automatic service behind that address verifies that
Upon receiving the certification your program adds my address to your whitelist and accepts the original message. After all, you now know my e-mail address. Even a spammer who would be willing to reveal his identity would be pummeled to a certain death by millions of certify requests (which would make his ISP very unhappy). And should a spammer once get on your whitelist, just blacklist him.
This would not be a burden for mailing lists, because the certifying procedure is only invoked during the first contact.
This scheme would triple the initial number of e-mail messages, but because it's a one time event, the overhead is small. Considering that 95 some percent of all e-mails seem to be spam, this could actually reduce the traffic significantly after all the spammers have either been auto-spammed back for every single piece of spam that they send, or vanished into oblivion if none of their messages ever reach people.
So, anybody willing to implement this?
Existence usually comes as a surprise (Idem)
I think the commercial software vendors are largely responsible for the massive increase in spam. IE is basically an ad delivery system; there's no way to control pop-ups, and no way to block images from ad servers. This is because from the corporate perspective our job as computer users is to view as many ads as humanly possible. Don't expect MS to be of any help. And don't expect any useful legislation either, as the DMA has a powerful and generous lobby in Washington.
But where proprietary software fails us, free software supplies the features that people actually want. Mozilla has built-in pop-up blocking and a great deal of work is going into spam filtering. On my linux box, I use spamassassin and vipul's razor for email, and filterproxy and mozilla to block ads and protect my privacy on the web. Very rarely does any spam make it into my inbox, and I almost never see ads of any kind online. However, it fills me with horror to use other peoples' computers. How can anyone stand all the flashing and blinking?
Conclusion: decent tools are the answer, not bug-eyed rants about the death of email.
4. SPEWS sends warning to your ISP
6. SPEWS blocks small IP range, sends second warning
8. SPEWS blocks larger IP range, sends third warning
When SPEWS mails people, I doubt they do so saying 'We're SPEWS and this is an official warning.' They'd do it saying 'This spammer at aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd hit my account this morning, please remove him'. This would have two advantages:
1) SPEWS remains anonymous - this helps, because by now there are an awful lot of spammers screaming for blood
2) ISPs have to treat every spam complaint seriously, because they have no way of knowing which ones are from SPEWS and which are from ordinary users
If SPEWS sent complaints in their own name, then ISPs would simply ignore all non-Spews complaints. An anonymous SPEWS leads to ISPs reading their abuse@ mailboxes with much greater care...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.