If nothing changes email will soon be unusable.
I've often thought about refusing to use email at all, and communicating with people I know with IRC on a server I host, and sharing files with good old FTP.
Maybe the Internet community needs to get together and write a new RFC for spam free email, and lock the damn thing down. Email could be refused with a forged from line. Also, there could be a negotiation stage (possibly). This has privacy and anonymity issues however. That could kill such an idea.
Someone needs to write a really good RFC for a new email "next generation" service and make it impossibly hard for spammers, that is simple and quick to implement. No 6-part RFCs with vague requirements and a long list of gotcha's. Quick and simple like the orginal SMTP, but locked down and designed around squishing spam from the start.
-- James
I've thought that Public Key Authentication could be used in the same way that PGP is intended to be used. But I'm afraid it would be too easy to spoof.
All the spammers would do is create thousands of dummy accounts (hence a community) to run around and trust each other and build a concensus of trust.
When they contact you as a new user, if you do a check on their credability, they come up roses (based on their inertia of so many public votes) and you get spammed. It's no different from the crap on P2P networks that's flooding out the real traffic and the bloggers who run ads for their own products by posting all over the internet as "joe user" to build a perception of user-based concensus on the product.
A potential alternative is to use a full-up Public-Private Key Authentication protocol like SSH might use with a Key combination unique for each server/user-account. Then if that key combination shows up on any spam, you revoke the original public key and they're toast. If they can't authenticate, they're toast.
The problem with this approach is twofold:
Expensive CPU cycles on email.
Malware will steal Keys from Windows computers faster than you can issue them.
With Windows have the insecure history it does, I'm not sure where the answer would come from. Don't use Windows?
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
