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To solve 'strangers can send me email' you don't need any fancy crypto. Randomly generated long aliases work great, as they can forward to your address with an
by throwaway984393 5y ago
To solve 'strangers can send me email' you don't need any fancy crypto. Randomly generated long aliases work great, as they can forward to your address with an "alias[.+]" prefix or "[.+]alias" postfix, and you can kill the aliases that receive spam. Killing an alias should send all such mail to spam, or result in a bounce back. If we can push that functionality into the MTA / MDA (along with a general spam button) the mail servers can learn and respond to spam that happens across all their user accounts and either start to deliver mail into Spam folders or push back on mail deliveries with either a delay or bounce.
I am concerned that charging even a penny per email would make it harder for people in developing nations to send mail (you need to understand how insanely poor some people are), and those are the countries that spammers might take advantage of. We should be very careful in today's world not to make technology that negatively affects the most vulnerable.
- twobitshifter 5y agoIsn’t it trivial to remove the alias from the address?
- throwaway984393 5y agoActually I meant you make the "public" e-mail address totally random, like "ksdjfksjlfdjasljhflsk@whatever.com". That address then forwards to "yourname+ksdjfksjlfdjasljhflsk@whatever.com". Then both your client and mail server will know both the "public" part of the address, and who it's supposed to really be delivered to. This enables spam filtering on a specific alias, or killing a specific alias. Additional support would need to be added to handle these features, and also automatically translating replies from your mail client so the From: address continues to be hidden. This idea mostly already exists in proprietary e-mail relays like Craigslist email addresses, but it would be nice if it were a standard.