Slashdot Mirror
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"
So I can't read the articles, but I don't see anything here that setting up a whitelist only mail server doesn't do
This is functionally equivelant to using a whitelist-only filter on your email, only worse in every way.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
A private mail exchange system is an awesome Idea, I'm sure tons of companies have home grown solutions already using email systems configured to not receive/send mail to people outside the company. This looks very intriguing to companys whose individual employees need to send lots of mail to eachother but not outside the company. Not only does it fight spam/viruses, but it helps keep documents confidential by not allowing employees to mail sensitive data around the net, it helps curb use of company resources for personal interests, and it decreases the amount of intervention IT staff will have in the daily operations of its employees. Less viruses mean less visits from IT staff which means more productivity accross the board. What can you be disgusted about when there is already a demand for the product? They arent trying to force something unwanted to anyone, they are recognizing legitimate need and demand and catering to it. Bravo.
There is nothing unethical about parting morons from their money. And I might also add, it's a quite lucrative endeavor!
This is nothing more than a fancy white-list, from what I can tell (the TechWorld article is slashdotted.)
Yes, a closed system that has user authentication built-in from the start has been proposed many, many times. The problem is getting the rest of the world to adopt such a system.
Just like the idea of charging a fractional penny to send an email and collecting a fractional penny when you receive one, so that email costs and revenues are balanced for the average person, but costs are astronomical for the spammer. Interesting idea, now how do you convert the planet over?
The solution to spam seems easy enough; it's the implementation that's the problem.
Actually, you can have a decentralised free messaging system that's immune to the types of abuses we see today (spam). We already have the smtp email foundation to build it on top of, and it's pretty damn simple to do. If *everyone* would just get valid, signed certificates to authenticate themselves as a given entity with a given email address, then *everyone* could turn on a switch in their mail client that says "reject all mail that isn't signed with a cert which matches the sender's address and that's signed by an authority I trust". If you make spam completely accountable to a real-world entity via cryptography, it largely solves the problem, because the problem is so easy to solve at that point.
There's already some competing standards for this stuff, and Enigmail (in moz and thunderbird) supports at least two of them. I'm pretty sure you can get an email cert from one of a few authorities pretty cheaply.
So, it really comes down to convincing the users, which is largely the job of email client vendors. When you first set up your account in Outlook, Thunderbird, or whatever, there should be a dialog box to the effect of:
Please click "Use Existing" to use an existing email certificate for this account, or click "Create" to create a new certificate....
With pointers to signing authorities and an explanation that the user would be doing their part to prevent spam if they would just take this simple measure.
Eventually everyone notices that all their legit email is signed, and starts turning on that "kill all unsigned mail" option in their mail client, and poof goes the spam problem.
11*43+456^2
Even more so than that most email systems have a configuration option (sometimes even per-user) that can disable public/internet email exchange. Even Microsoft Exchange has that! At my company, internet email is actually turned off by default until the user takes a "training" course on how to use the Internet properly. Interestingly enough, the words "spam" appear nowhere in that training.
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