Real Change for Email?

You wouldn't gather it from my other articles, but I think there's at least one large scale spam solution that might work. I'm not talking about a better spam e-mail filter, but actually changing the protocol used to send mail.

The key is to require users to pay for sending email. Not necessarily with money, but in computation time. I won't get into the math - but its possible to require a sender's computer to solve a mathematical problem that would take it about 30 seconds.

The sender wouldn't be aware of anything unusual - there'd just be a minor latency before the message was sent. Even employing thousands of zombie computers - it would be difficult for spammers to send their massive spam email batches.

There would be potential problems for legitimate newsletters, but they could be whitelisted by the receiver.

The proposals exist - and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't work. The problem is the implementation. Who wants to be the first one to switch over? No one wants to start requiring anyone who emails them to install a new mail client, etc.

I think the trick is to make it a gradual process - with added benefits for users who start making the move.

For the foreseeable future, mail servers and clients would continue to support traditional SMTP. Email clients supporting the new standard would add the computational signature to -all- messages.

Users would continue to receive both signed and unsigned emails. They could choose how to configure their mail client to best handle each type of message. Aggressively anti-spam users could opt to block email in Outlook or other email clients not containing the signature. Alternately, they could have an email sent back to the sender requiring a manual challenge-response.

Depending on how it was implemented - it may be possible to deploy the system entirely client-side without upgrading any mail servers. Servers however, could benefit by using the authentication information to help stop unwanted messages.

As time goes on, anyone who was serious about email would have a new client supporting authentication. Email sent with authentication could bypass spam programs, letting users again feel confident that their email was actually getting through.

Related Microsoft Article

Back