Will Email Go Whitelist Only?

Spam and phishing attempts seem to be on a perpetual up tick. In response, blocking systems get tougher and tougher, but the problem remains. Too much of email is worthless junk. The signal to noise ratio is getting out of control.

Beyond email, instant messaging and to even some extent the web itself are victims to spam.

One possible scenario is a future where all email is subject to whitelists. Only email senders that have previously been cleared would make it directly into your inbox. Everyone else will have to pass some kind of test to prove they aren't a machine sending you spam. An alternate strategy is to apply tough filtering criteria to unlisted senders.

There are a few problems with this approach. The main one being that sometimes the machine sending you email is in fact trying to send you something important. Email receipts and shipping notifications would be blocked by any such email filter. Senders could of course be manually whitelisted, assuming the user doesn't forget to.

One way to mitigate this risk is to standardize a mechanism for adding third parties to whitelists. It could in effect be a standardized file, like a video file or spreadsheet that would be downloaded by your browser, and then processed by an anti-spam program. Companies could provide a link to the file on their website indicating, "click here to make sure our email gets to you."

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