The Spam Has Got To Go
John Patrick says, "The Spam Has Got To Go". He's right, but he doesn't offer a solution.
Changing addresses doesn't fix the problem:
People are advised to get a new email address to avoid the problem. That is analogous to having to pick up your furniture and family and move to a new house. And then within days if not hours, be found and have your mailbox stuffed once again.
Mailbox filters help, but are an extra effort, don't always work, and can have adverse consequences:
Filter rules? Redesign your mailbox, dig a new hole, pour the concrete -- every day. Build filters to screen out certain topics--but in the process raise the possibility that you will miss something important.
Say what you want about D. J. Bernstein -- developer of qmail and other infrastructure software, with a knack for annoying sections of the Internet community. But his proposed Internet Mail 2000 infrastructure would be a step in the right direction:
IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility.
This shift might do a lot to reduce spam. It would move the burden of storage onto the spammer. "Inbox Full" messages, caused by spending a few days away from the computer, would become a thing of the past.
However, even the dramatic action of replacing the Internet mail infrastructure might not be the right answer. Maybe we need to turn the entire idea of internet mail on its head:
- Modify e.g. weblog applications to provide a separate "channel" for each person to whom you want to send mail.
- Each channel is published to a separate password-protected directory on a webserver, with an RSS feed to summarize the contents of the directory.
- Each receiver that wants to get mail from you can add this feed to his RSS aggregator, which will check weekly/daily/hourly/every minute for new messages.
- A link in the message or a SOAP interface will tell the webserver to delete the message.
We might want to provide some kind of interface that will allow people that you don't (yet) communicate with to either send you messages or send you a notification that there are messages in your channel.
We would have to have some infrastructure that allows me to set up a password-protected feed for you before we can actually exchange messages. This sounds like a key-exchange problem; there is probably an elegant solution that has already been developed by some security/encryption genius.
[original story via Scripting News]
4:50:32 PM 
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