3 ms·

Is it signed by trusted key. No? Discard. Spam problem is solved. Bonus no cold calling. You could use something like zrtp once for fingerprint verificatiin.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago
You can even do that, plus add two things. 1) mail that gets filtered gets an automatic reply 'your email went into the spam folder, here's how to reach me if it's genuine', and 2) any email with say $1 or some threshold you can manually set is accepted into the inbox with a 'paid' label. Things like bitcoin have made it pretty easy to add digital money attachment to email as an anti-spam measure, first proposed as a proof of work system by Cryptographer Adam Back to introduce a cost to sending email, a bit like a computerised form of a captcha, something that doesn't affect normal users but is disastrously expensive for power users like spammers. The combination ensures that 1) spam gets filtered 2) genuine emailers flagged as spammers get notified their email didn't arrive 3) important email can reach the recipient if it's worth enough (say $1, totally undoable for a spammer who'd end up with a cost-per-click on his email campaign of hundreds of dollars instead of cents, completely unworkable on any scale, but financially no problem for when say a stranger wants to send you a genuine email for the first time with a non-trusted key).
ambicapter 11y ago
> Bonus no cold calling. Not a bonus. Plenty of relevant emailing gets done 'cold'.
- 3pt14159 11y ago
  Trust networks can handle that just fine.
- schoen 11y ago
  Yesterday evening I e-mailed the professor quoted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210474 about the similarity between his ideas about Hitler's ideology and a short story Borges published in 1946. We had never communicated before; I heard of him for the first time through this press interview. He replied and said the connection was interesting. I wouldn't be that opposed to ideas where people should put money at stake when making new unsolicited contacts, but I think a challenge is that people's wealth varies by many orders of magnitude, the recipient-perceived relevance of what they want to say varies by orders of magnitude, and the correlation between the two is often only moderate (maybe mediated by things like education, social capital, and fame).

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

You can even do that, plus add two things. 1) mail that gets filtered gets an automatic reply 'your email went into the spam folder, here's how to reach me if it's genuine', and 2) any email with say $1 or some threshold you can manually set is accepted into the inbox with a 'paid' label. Things like bitcoin have made it pretty easy to add digital money attachment to email as an anti-spam measure, first proposed as a proof of work system by Cryptographer Adam Back to introduce a cost to sending email, a bit like a computerised form of a captcha, something that doesn't affect normal users but is disastrously expensive for power users like spammers. The combination ensures that 1) spam gets filtered 2) genuine emailers flagged as spammers get notified their email didn't arrive 3) important email can reach the recipient if it's worth enough (say $1, totally undoable for a spammer who'd end up with a cost-per-click on his email campaign of hundreds of dollars instead of cents, completely unworkable on any scale, but financially no problem for when say a stranger wants to send you a genuine email for the first time with a non-trusted key).

ambicapter 11y ago

> Bonus no cold calling. Not a bonus. Plenty of relevant emailing gets done 'cold'.

3pt14159 11y ago
Trust networks can handle that just fine.
schoen 11y ago
Yesterday evening I e-mailed the professor quoted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210474 about the similarity between his ideas about Hitler's ideology and a short story Borges published in 1946. We had never communicated before; I heard of him for the first time through this press interview. He replied and said the connection was interesting. I wouldn't be that opposed to ideas where people should put money at stake when making new unsolicited contacts, but I think a challenge is that people's wealth varies by many orders of magnitude, the recipient-perceived relevance of what they want to say varies by orders of magnitude, and the correlation between the two is often only moderate (maybe mediated by things like education, social capital, and fame).