Filter promises spam feast without e-mail famine

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A better solution

This is a bad idea. The problem is I want to take back control of MY personalized email address. I don't want a cryptic email address that all my real friends can't remember.

Here's my solution:

This requires a new feature to be added to mail servers and clients to implement this functionality, but it should be relatively straightforward and is 100% backwards compatible with non-conforming servers and clients.

Basically how it should work is if johnny@aol.com sends me a message at andy@att.com, the mail server at aol.com will store a list of recently-sent-emails. All it stores is the sender email address (johnny@aol.com) and a unique id for the email, maybe a CRC number derived from the message contents and all attachments.

When the receiving mail server gets the message, it contacts the server at aol.com (derived from the 'from' field) and queries to see if a message from such a person was actually sent. It sends the email address (johnny@aol.com) together with its own generated CRC number. The sending server now checks its list of recently-sent-email and either returns a yes or no based on the test to see if the address/CRC pair is on the list. Once the user downloads the message and removes it from the server the receiving server sends a message to the originating server that it's ok to remove the message record from the recently-sent-email list.

This method makes it impossible to spoof the from field. If spammers can't spoof the from field they lose their anonymous/fake cover. It's possible to trace them back to the originating ISP and that ISP will have records of whom that account belongs to or will simply shut down the account if it's a free mail service. Basically spam can be traced back to its source (and maybe even viruses).

Of course, not all servers will implement such functionality right away. The end user can set up their mail client to simply filter email from servers that don't support this feature into a special folder that will contain "unverified" email, but this folder will get less and less email as this feature gets implemented more and more. If the server does support this feature, and the sender is not verified, you KNOW its spam. If AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo implemented this feature, and you have a client that supports this feature, you KNOW you won't get spam from any of those servers anymore.

$0.02

Posted by: PW_z   Posted on: 02/05/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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