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Beat Spam By Not Using Email
judgecorp writes "We had a press release - by post of course - about a scheme that eradicates spam and viruses. It's not email, oh no. It's digital mail or dmail, a private system that no one else can send messages to. Assuming it's genuine (and the PR person is called Mike Hardware) it uses XML and SQL to build a 1980s bulletin board, to sell to niche markets (such as very close-knit families). Our story is here, and if you don't hear from us again, it's because we are busy emailing ourselves with our two free dmail addresses. Peter Judge, Techworld"
I'm all for trying new concepts, but pardon my disgust. I'm an entrepreneur myself and I understand money makes the world go-round, but I shudder to think where we'd all be if the guys who came up with Apache were trying to start it now.
D-Mail, G-Mail, PurplePokaDotMail are just more examples of someone trying to create, patent, exploit, etcetera when there are far more ethical and lucrative methods of making money. Of course this relies on people getting thier heads out of thier proverbial asses, but what can you do?
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
IMHO completely dropping email as we have it now is the only way against spam. No matter what's been done so far has kept existing email infrastructure as legacy. A new extension on top of email might get some play, but it's all irrelevant while the same system is still able to be used for spam.
Drop email. Drop SMTP. Change the ports it uses. Change the entire system, and scrap what's gone before and start again. Make it PURPOSELY incompatible.
Unless of course you want to keep getting spam. If so, keep using email as it is.
A proprietary system that no one can post to coupled with a password needed to view said content sounds suspiciously like a static second level webpage or a ssl private network. Just...like...a...private forum. We do the same thing here at work for vendors who buy our products, a static page updated weekly by the sales department that only x amount of vendors have access to, they can read their mail "posted specials" and later send updates to the dmail admin "webmaster" or "sales". Let's just face it. Spam as much as I hate it is here to stay. Yes we can all agree that eventually the systems will get better at defeating spam and bulk mailings, but the brilliant minds that are developing the stopping systems have the brilliant minds that are bent on defeating those other brilliant minds. But removing the system from the culprits is a novel approach, lets just not herald it as the end or even a stepping stone to stopping spam.
Let's keep in mind that patents are in place to keep lawyers employed and keep them litigating. -CatGrep
Obviously, if you cut yourself off of the system, you won't get spam from it. I don't get email spam on my IRC connection, either. It's only worth anything if it's an open standard and fixes the design flaws in current email protocols. Considering that this is not at all hard to do, I am stunned each time that people haven't switched to something better than SMTP yet.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
And now we get blog spam and forum trolls, whereas a well filtered Usenet feed (such as Uni Berlin) is now extremely useful.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
But they're also much more annoying to use - first you have to find a decent forum. Then you (often) have to register. Then you find that actually you get flamed for posting a newbie question - but the search is so useless that you can't find the answer that was posted last week (and it's all .asp and not indexed by google).
Then you go back to usenet.
Unfortunately, I get more spam from snail mail than from email, and it's much harder to ignore, too.
I guess it has something to do with me keeping my email addresses to myself and my contacts, whereas my street address can be found in public directories. Oh, and I don't think I could install a decent spam filter on my smailbox, either.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The trick is, what do you replace it with? There are a lot of design constraints on email, among them:
* Sending message should be free or extremely cheap
* It should not be required to receive an invitation to talk to somebody
You can quibble with those requirements if you want to design a new system, but if you follow them any system you propose risks being spam-ridden. The spammers will not say, "Oh, gee, they've all moved to a different port and protocol, let's forget it then." They'll adopt any new protocol, faster than users will.
So what about present email are you willing to give up? Converting from "free" to "extremely cheap" sounds promising, but it's still prone to the army of zombies, and exchanging trivial amounts of cash is still difficult and expensive.
There are various ways to introduce blocks in the "anybody can talk to anybody" system. Some systems email you back when you send me a message for the first time, which at least proves the existence of a back path and to a small degree a real human (not a zombie) on the other end. Bayesian filters provide extra points to people who have emailed you before without excluding people you've never heard of.
Or maybe we weaken the second requirement by distinguishing between promiscuous and non-promiscuous addresses. My friends email me at one account, and if I could I'd give each of them a separate address. People I trust less get different accounts. People who break the trust find that the address disappears, and because those addresses aren't promiscuous, relatively few other people are inconvenienced by that. I've effectively whitelisted those addresses.
But I also monitor info@foo.com email addresses, which really do want to take email from anybody in the world. I can't drop those when they get spammed, because many people are expecting to get to me through them. But if we made promiscuous addresses rare, we could use more whitelists and perhaps change the balance.
Perhaps if your average spam-buying-jackass@comcast.net were able to receive mail only from people he'd whitelisted, he'd get less spam and the spammers would give up. But that would be wildly inconvenient for him.
The point is, most of these could be built on top of SMTP, and any SMTP alternative you propose is going to have either promiscuity or conveninence problems. Just dropping SMTP just moves the problem to a new protocol but with massive infrastructure pain.
You don't have to worry about this closed loop system. Why not just rely on some kind of messaging service instead of 'dmail'. The whole thing sounds kind of stupid considering the purpose of an email address is not to be "out of contact".
Besides, all a company has to do is close off their email gateway and they can accomplish the same thing this new 'innovation' provides.
Time for a new /. Section:
Lame Product Announcements
Exchange is XML based with a database back-end. It's got a very nice web front end and can be configured any way you'd like. AND, you can use Outlook if you want.
No typing @domain.com. No viruses. No spam. Gee, those things sure are easy to provide when you have 200 users and no internet e-mail connection.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
It's the Tragedy of the Commons in action, and it is not as uncommon as one might think.
In essence, IM services are "walled E-Mail gardens". I know people who aren't totally tech savvy who use services like AIM and don't use E-mail. Granted, these tend to be "gramma" types who use messaging services to chat with the kids and grandkids, but the principle remains.
And for those who say it dosen't work: AIM + whitelisting works wonders.
It may sound a bit odd to a few of us "geeks", but some people only want to hear from people they know (i.e. have been formally introduced to). Spam is only encouraging a behaviour that people already practice on the phone (with Caller ID and/or answering machines) and their front door (with the little peep-hole).. if I don't know you, I ain't gonna talk to you.
Thanks, marketing departments of the world, for helping to create a more insular society.
...back in the 80's I worked for CompuServe. They had :-).
quite a market for private email ("InfoPlex" anyone ?
Prize to the first person who tells me what FILGE stood for
Of course, the market existed because people wanted email,
not because they wanted to avoid spam....but I have had
thoughts lately of setting up a closed email system
or at the very least a whitelist syste to allow my kids
to have "safe" email. The idea is not all that weird.
---eludom
I ignore all CR messages. Nobody's email is important enought to jump through those hoops. I'll call you by phone instead if I have something to say. If you get tired of me calling, you can add me to your whitelist yourself.
Edith Keeler Must Die