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"
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!"
By not using computers.
Now where did I put that abacus?
I recently beat seasonal allergies without relying on any medicine at all. I simply decapitated myself with a steak knife. It was so easy, no more running nose, or red, watery eyes!
/. IT color scheme any more!
John.
PS And there's an added benefit: I can't see the hideous
I'm waiting for dmail rev 2 that adds on network-to-network communication, so you can dmail your friends without having to have an account on every single different network. Oh, wait..
Damien
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
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
Just do what i do. One email address for pr0n. One for serious stuff. One for each girlfriend. Then another one for some more pr0n.
- I got my free iPod and a free Nintendo DS....why not
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
On current trends there are only 25 possible names of mail services (given that E is already taken).
google got G, and these guys have claimed D.
That leaves only 23 more slashdot headlines before people have to start being original! Heck, maybe they'll actually invent someting new (or maybe that's too optimistic)...
Beat Spam By Not Using Email
:)
To avoid viruses and hackers and such, they used to turn off their servers every night when no one was in the office to monitor them...
It wasn't too hard to get an offsite hosting contract though
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
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.
- The 'old-style' email where anyone could send a message to everyone, that all the traditional MTAs (mail transfer agents) supported. Anonymous messaging is desirable in this system.
- The 'new-style' email where everyone wants to silently drop messages from spammers they don't like; and corporationos want to silently drop messages they don't want employees to get, etc. Anonymous messaging is scary in this system (corporations don't like it); and in contrast, control is a key feature.
The first requirement's needs were very well met by sendmail, etc; and really don't need to be forced in a corporate environment.Nothing really met the second (intentionally lossy (some would say broken)) requirements for corporations who wanted to make sure that many mails did not get delivered.
I welcome the day that all the guys with different requirements from sendmail simply move on to some other messaging system rather than try to screw with something that's worked well for decades (SPF, etc).
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.
Time for a new /. Section:
Lame Product Announcements
Speak truth to power.
From dmails's "background information", page:
"secure messaging system which was instantaneous and able to transfer large files rapidly...a safe and secure platform which can not be penetrated by unwanted visitors or observers...exceptionally fast medium for accessing and exchanging large files such as music, images and film, with huge capacity. For starters, each dmail address will have one gigabyte of space... argeted at several niche sectors where its properties are particularly relevant. These include education, friends/family, teenage and corporate markets"
The *IAAs are going to love this if it takes off. But it has the same vulnerability as any "closed" system, it's brilliant at the beginning but if it grows beyond a certain number you get trolls and spammers.
From Email to Dmail sounds like a step backwards. Where's Fmail(TM)?
Of course, Gmail has them all beat.