Re: Feedback on Hypertext Mail Protocol (a.k.a. Stub Email)

On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 04:11:44PM -0800, Nathan Cheng wrote:
> There are over 1600 messages on this list over a period of about 5 
> years, so I was wondering if someone could write about 3 sentences to 
> fill me in on the current state of IM2000 affairs, as well as what 
> primary objections to my idea--or ideas such as mine--may have already 
> been aired on this list.

The current state is that it's dead :-) Yours is one of a handful of
messages here over the last several months.

The name of your project is quite interesting, because arguing the need for
a new E-mail system tends to end up as "squaring the circle". That is,
people seem to think that having a verified electronic identity for the
sender of a mail will result in a reduction in spam; but since new
electronic identities can be created at whim [1], this can never solve the
spam problem.

Spammers will just use whatever new protocol or mechanism is put in place.
At best you can solve the 'joe job' problem of receiving spurious bounces to
messages you never sent, but there are far simpler mechanisms for doing this
which work with SMTP mail today [2]

That is, unless you want every E-mail sender identity to be certified by an
agency like Verisign or cacert.org or your national government; or that you
will always have a prior arrangement with every person with whom you want to
exchange E-mail, learning their electronic identity out-of-band [3]. When
pushed down this route, it turns out that people generally don't want to
lose the ability to receive E-mails from people they've not been formally
"introduced" to by some other mechanism, nor to have to jump through
identity verification hoops just to get an E-mail address.

I wrote an assessment of IM2000 a while back:
http://pobox.com/~b.candler/doc/misc/im2000.html

The essence is that while I think "pull" E-mail systems do have benefits
(which I expect are shared by your own proposal), by themselves they are
unlikely to reduce spam in the way that has been claimed for IM2000.

Regards,

Brian.

[1] Taking electronic identity as E-mail address (user@domain), then you can
easily create new ones by:

- registering a new domain (cheap, easy, and with thousands of registrars
  to choose from there will always be ones with lax security checks)
- using a dynamic DNS provider
- using a freemail service like hotmail.com, netscape.com
- using a free/pay-as-you-go ISP dialup service, which gives you one or
  more E-mail accounts
- taking over someone else's account, e.g. by hacking into the machine where
  their credentials are stored. By some estimates, around 50% of all
  Windows machines currently connected to the Internet are infested with
  viruses or malware.

Unless you can plug *all* those holes, spammers will have an infinite supply
of valid E-mail addresses to draw upon.

If the electronic identity is a public/private key pair, then new key pairs
can be generated on demand within seconds.

[2] Examples include BATV and SES. These can be deployed incrementally and
give immediate benefit to the person performing the deployment; there is no
need to wait for the rest of the Internet to upgrade themselves as well.

[3] Such as printing your E-mail address or RSA key fingerprint on a
business card, and handing it out to everyone you need to E-mail. The other
party will need to import this into their E-mail client before they can
receive mail from you. This is essentially "whitelisting" in today's world;
"pull" E-mail systems can give a stronger check on the claimed identity of a
received mail, but it's already quite hard for a spammer to guess which
people are in your whitelist when sending you spam.