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Certified Email Not Here to Reduce Spam
An anonymous reader writes "Goodmail CEO Richard Gingras surprised Legislators and advocacy groups today when he announced that the CertifiedMail program being implemented by AOL and Yahoo is not meant to reduce spam. Rather than helping to reduce spam Gingras claimed that the point is to allow users to verify who important messages are really from, like a message from your bank or credit card company."
CAKE
But, I've not had much time to work on it since I've been employed. :-( And it's a much nicer, decentralized solution to this problem that has potentially much less weight and wider applicability than PGP.
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The US Postal Service demoed just such a thing many, many years ago. They had an email encryption and delivery service to verify that the message was not altered. I suppose the problem in certifying the sender and receiver and proving delivery (to a person - not a mail spool) were technical issues they couldn't handle.
The difference of the USPS vs. Goodmail is that the USPS has official legal authority for such thing as mail tampering and proof of delivery.
I suppose if they were to offer the service now, Goodmail would buy a law to prohibit to USPS from competing against a private business as Sen. Santorum is trying to do with the weather service.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Can I ask what happened to using Personal certificates?? Why, when we use SSL certificates to verify that a website we are visting is actually the true company, can't we use personal certificates to verify that the email we are reciving is actually from the company?? Surely they could configure their mail servers to filter out email on this basis without requiring a 3rd part solution that makes you pay for it. Hate to state the obvious but this is just the big companies way to getting their hands in on a great free thing that the internet provides