On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 09:12:46 +1000, Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote or quoted :
>Suppose I wanted to gather industrial espionage about, oh, say Roedy >Green. If my virus could impersonate him, I could tell everyone in sight >that his email has changed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or wherever). I would >harvest his email I would say by extrapolating the problem of spam and snooping that the next level of email software needs to concentrate on the following: 1. routine and transparent encryption. 2. making spam no longer economic. Blocking all spam is, even in theory, impossible. I sometimes read a message and am ambivalent myself about whether I wanted to read or receive it. The key is to provide efficient, transparent spam solutions. They can be layered to filter higher and higher percentages of mail depending on how big your spam problem is. 3. prevent phishing. When PayPal sends you an email, you want to know for sure it really is from PayPal. This means corporate users at least will all have digital ids, and all emails will be digitally signed. 4. status tracking. Unless blocked by the receiver, the sender knows if his message has been receiveived/read. 5. making it impossible for any incoming email to mount any sort of attack. the only parts the email software processes are the data parts. Any enclosed programs must be explicitly installed. The email software would warn if any code were not digitally signed with proper certificate to identify the author. Especially with spam, there are no perfect solutions, but at least we could do many times better than what we are living with and put the spammers out of business. -- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. http://mindprod.com Again taking new Java programming contracts. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
