Re: Thinking outside the box

> > You haven't seen From fraud?
> >
> > I get spam "from" myself all the time.
> >
> > That's trivial to script.
>
> I think Martijn was being ironic ;-)

I was. :-)

And at the same time, I do believe that 'From' already provides everything your subject tags and X-Password headers provide. They're all reasonably trivial to script, so if everyone started filtering on From and only allowed approved senders into their inboxes, spammers would start to harvest pairs of addresses - like they could harvest subject tags or X-Password headers. But I do believe that if we tried hard we could come up with a crypto-based solution that allows everyone to give access to their inbox only to pre-approved entities. You need an asymmetric, decentralised social network.

(Let's put aside for the moment that you'll still get spam from compromised accounts and that these will be a lot harder to filter. So the amount of spam that ends up into people's inboxes may not really decrease.)

Much more importantly: it doesn't solve the problem of emails that you didn't expect. I think that being able to receive such emails, when they are legitimate, is an essential property of email.

Martijn.


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