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> If email was fully decentralized (everyone runs their own server) this centralized power could not exist and there wouldn't be any problem. You would have di
by remus 3y ago
> If email was fully decentralized (everyone runs their own server) this centralized power could not exist and there wouldn't be any problem.
You would have different problems though. Spam would still be hard, or arguably even harder, because you would have lots of small mail servers with no idea if they are trustworthy or not. Is this uncle Bob, who I havent spoken to for 30 years, sending me a heartfelt message about the family? Or is it a scammer trying to cream some cash out of me?
- jjav 3y ago> Spam would still be hard, or arguably even harder Doesn't make any difference. The major sources of spam today are places like gmail and outlook servers. You have to run some message classification regardless of where it came from.
- remus 3y ago> The major sources of spam today are places like gmail and outlook servers. By volume perhaps, but is that true as a proportion of all mail that was sent via these services? I'd be surprised, though I'd be very interested if there where any numbers publicly available.
- jjav 3y ago> By volume perhaps, but is that true as a proportion of all mail that was sent via these services? Would you care? I can say that I don't care (as someone running my own email infrastructure). I run filtering on all incoming email, I don't assign any weight to which email server it came from because it's not a useful factor.
- ndriscoll 3y agoThe spam situation could also be better if we had designed into that space. Want to send a single email to a sender that you don't have an existing relationship with? Hashcash. Have a web service that sends lots of emails? Get user consent beforehand with e.g. an oauth token to bypass or lower hashcash difficulty.