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"

Comments

And avoid viruses

[Anonymous Coward]

By not using computers.

Now where did I put that abacus?

Re:And avoid viruses

[blibloblu]

Ink and paper: tried that also. Unfortunately, people wouldn't appreciate my sending HTML letters (which took so much time to write down).

Slashdotted

[Nos.]

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

multiple Emails...

[Moonlapse]

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.

Re:multiple Emails...

[Anonymous Coward]

so you have 2 emails then?

Re:New concept same stuff...

[l4m3z0r]

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.

Re:eMail replacement.

[bobintetley]

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.

This comes up every time someone mentions spam. You simply cannot have a decentralised, free, messaging system without a small minority of people abusing it.

Think of it as the price you pay for having a decentralised, free line of communication. This is a social rather than technological problem and I'd rather have spam than a tightly controlled mail solution that could be taken away from me or cost me more money.

obChecklist

[spoonyfork]

Your post advocates a

(*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
(*) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(*) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(*) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(*) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(*) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Re:New concept same stuff...

[JAgostoni]

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.