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Thanks for the reference. But this misses out on another important tool already in use against spamming: White lists. Yes, in theory PoW makes mass mailing ver

Thanks for the reference. But this misses out on another important tool already in use against spamming: White lists. Yes, in theory PoW makes mass mailing very expensive and thus directly hurts spammers that are not on the common anti-spam white lists. Organizations that need to mass mail users for legitimate reasons are however most likely already on anti-spam white lists and thus need not to do a very hard PoW hash or none at all as they are already proven to not be spamming. So this paper's conclusion is not the real deal.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
I imagine some inbound email could be whitelisted automatically, from some authentication tech. If I sign up for mailings, some app (email? browser) can give a one-use cert or id that can be passed back in email headers. If that company sells my email, I can block further emails from that source. It doesn't seem hard.
theamk 6y ago
If you can get people to use centralized anti-spam white lists, you do not need proof of work at all. But having such list will make email effectively centrally controlled. I would hope we never end up in this situation. The current system is bad, but making it centralized is even worse - just read what happens to businesses when Facebook/google bans them.
- enchiridion 6y ago
  I don't think it needs to be centralized. Why not have a white list per account? When you sign up for a list or service you can add certain domains to you personal list. Of course some of the larger services may offer a default white list for common domains.
  - theamk 6y ago
    So every time I type my email somewhere, I also have to go to my mail provider and pre-emptively whitelist the sender? This does not sound like a very good UX. I suppose you can have a special system where you have a browser plugin which automatically generates some sort of subscription token and pastes it alongside email into subscription form.. but this will need cooperation from every mail-sending app, and will not handle non-web uses cases at all...
    - victor_e 6y ago
      I use Hey.com which allows me to screen first time senders [1] and it works really well. This is in combination to a spam filter. [1] https://hey.com/features/the-screener/ https://hey.com/features/the-screener/

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

I imagine some inbound email could be whitelisted automatically, from some authentication tech. If I sign up for mailings, some app (email? browser) can give a one-use cert or id that can be passed back in email headers. If that company sells my email, I can block further emails from that source. It doesn't seem hard.

theamk 6y ago

If you can get people to use centralized anti-spam white lists, you do not need proof of work at all. But having such list will make email effectively centrally controlled. I would hope we never end up in this situation. The current system is bad, but making it centralized is even worse - just read what happens to businesses when Facebook/google bans them.

enchiridion 6y ago
I don't think it needs to be centralized. Why not have a white list per account? When you sign up for a list or service you can add certain domains to you personal list. Of course some of the larger services may offer a default white list for common domains.
- theamk 6y ago
  So every time I type my email somewhere, I also have to go to my mail provider and pre-emptively whitelist the sender? This does not sound like a very good UX. I suppose you can have a special system where you have a browser plugin which automatically generates some sort of subscription token and pastes it alongside email into subscription form.. but this will need cooperation from every mail-sending app, and will not handle non-web uses cases at all...
  - victor_e 6y ago
    I use Hey.com which allows me to screen first time senders [1] and it works really well. This is in combination to a spam filter. [1] https://hey.com/features/the-screener/ https://hey.com/features/the-screener/