4 ms·

If you were to remake email from the ground up, how would you solve the spam problem while keeping it as decentralized of a system as it is now?

dredmorbius 13y ago
Engineering in a lot of reputation management and metrics would help. There are some interesting (I'm not sure "compelling" or "strong" is necessarily the case) arguments to be made for enabling open relays and other forms of unauthenticated messaging. John Gilmore of EFF has fought that battle for a long time, and still runs an open relay on toad.com. Signing and authentication measures (particularly on header data) have to be both standard and quick to process. Methods which increase the costs of delivery -- pacing receipt rates from a given IP or block, can help. Being able to specify receipt priorities: high for IPs and ranges with which frequent legitimate business is transacted, very slow for most others, would also be useful. Along with a lot of built-in support for this. Killing :80 and moving to entirely secured ports wouldn't be a bad move either.
- phunehehe0 13y ago
  Maybe you mean 25 or something else? Port 80 is for HTTP. And what does a secure port mean? If you want people to be able to talk through a port you have to open it. The number doesn't matter.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Doh! Yes. :25. By "secure port", I mean forcing encryption of all over-the-wire traffic. It's happening now in many cases with STARTTLS (modulo utter brokenness of the CA and SSL/TLS systems), but that's still only opportunistic. And of course, encrypting payloads would be vastly preferable. Headers as well other than absolutely required for delivery.
gabemart 13y ago
Any such discussion will be well informed by https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
revelation 13y ago
Freenet has the Web of Trust: https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Web_of_Trust https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Web_of_Trust
leccine 13y ago
How about a PKI system were one or more authorities can sign keys and the email server admins can approve public keys based on its combined score coming from the authorities. Authorities could be universities, engineering organizations and other non-profit entities.
- mpyne 13y ago
  So now people have to register identities and can't use anonymous email addresses. And it wouldn't fix the issue anyways since spammers would just use botnets of legit sender addresses.
  - leccine 13y ago
    You are mixing up registration with registration with real data. You could still register an email address with arbitrary details and after a while you could establish a score that would grant your non-spam status. What you are confused with is that in this system there is no disposable email address. That is actually a valid concern but I don't use those so i really don't care.
drpancake 13y ago
Require a small fee to send an email, e.g. $0.01. Small enough not to matter for legitimate users, large enough to make spam unprofitable. Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency would be ideal for facilitating micro-transactions like this. Interestingly, the Hashcash concept was originally designed to fight spam, and later became one of the important ideas that made the invention of Bitcoin possible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
- okasaki 13y ago
  That wouldn't work for mailing lists.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    One could add a proof of permission model to that to cover things like mailing lists and other regular sources of email. Something like: I sign up for a mailing list. The mailing list mail server contacts my mail server. My mail server presents to me a request for free delivery. I approve it. My mail server gives the mailing list server a secret token. Each mailing list message includes proof that the message has been blessed by the sender and that the sending server knows the token.
    - jrockway 13y ago
      What stops this server from then using that token to spam you?
      - wpietri 13y ago
        I'd do it with revocation. Right now I give out tagged addresses to most vendors, and I know others do it for lists. When a tag goes bad, I just route any further mail to my spam trainer.
        jrockway 13y ago
        But that means for every legitimate mailing list you're on, you get one spam. And you lose the legitimate mailing list just because their token got compromised. Dunno, I feel like we should just charge for mailing lists too. Or use usenet!
bcoates 13y ago
Separate authentication from message delivery. The problem with both spam and spam mitigation measures is that the message is considered as coming 'from' a sending system instead of the actual originator of the email. Splitting these up converts one impossible problem into a tricky but mostly solved problem (delivery) and a hard problem that has to be addressed anyway (internet identity)

dredmorbius 13y ago

Engineering in a lot of reputation management and metrics would help. There are some interesting (I'm not sure "compelling" or "strong" is necessarily the case) arguments to be made for enabling open relays and other forms of unauthenticated messaging. John Gilmore of EFF has fought that battle for a long time, and still runs an open relay on toad.com. Signing and authentication measures (particularly on header data) have to be both standard and quick to process. Methods which increase the costs of delivery -- pacing receipt rates from a given IP or block, can help. Being able to specify receipt priorities: high for IPs and ranges with which frequent legitimate business is transacted, very slow for most others, would also be useful. Along with a lot of built-in support for this. Killing :80 and moving to entirely secured ports wouldn't be a bad move either.

phunehehe0 13y ago
Maybe you mean 25 or something else? Port 80 is for HTTP. And what does a secure port mean? If you want people to be able to talk through a port you have to open it. The number doesn't matter.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Doh! Yes. :25. By "secure port", I mean forcing encryption of all over-the-wire traffic. It's happening now in many cases with STARTTLS (modulo utter brokenness of the CA and SSL/TLS systems), but that's still only opportunistic. And of course, encrypting payloads would be vastly preferable. Headers as well other than absolutely required for delivery.

gabemart 13y ago

Any such discussion will be well informed by https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

revelation 13y ago

Freenet has the Web of Trust: https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Web_of_Trust https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Web_of_Trust

leccine 13y ago

How about a PKI system were one or more authorities can sign keys and the email server admins can approve public keys based on its combined score coming from the authorities. Authorities could be universities, engineering organizations and other non-profit entities.

mpyne 13y ago
So now people have to register identities and can't use anonymous email addresses. And it wouldn't fix the issue anyways since spammers would just use botnets of legit sender addresses.
- leccine 13y ago
  You are mixing up registration with registration with real data. You could still register an email address with arbitrary details and after a while you could establish a score that would grant your non-spam status. What you are confused with is that in this system there is no disposable email address. That is actually a valid concern but I don't use those so i really don't care.

drpancake 13y ago

Require a small fee to send an email, e.g. $0.01. Small enough not to matter for legitimate users, large enough to make spam unprofitable. Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency would be ideal for facilitating micro-transactions like this. Interestingly, the Hashcash concept was originally designed to fight spam, and later became one of the important ideas that made the invention of Bitcoin possible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

okasaki 13y ago
That wouldn't work for mailing lists.
- wpietri 13y ago
  One could add a proof of permission model to that to cover things like mailing lists and other regular sources of email. Something like: I sign up for a mailing list. The mailing list mail server contacts my mail server. My mail server presents to me a request for free delivery. I approve it. My mail server gives the mailing list server a secret token. Each mailing list message includes proof that the message has been blessed by the sender and that the sending server knows the token.
  - jrockway 13y ago
    What stops this server from then using that token to spam you?
    - wpietri 13y ago
      I'd do it with revocation. Right now I give out tagged addresses to most vendors, and I know others do it for lists. When a tag goes bad, I just route any further mail to my spam trainer.
      - jrockway 13y ago
        But that means for every legitimate mailing list you're on, you get one spam. And you lose the legitimate mailing list just because their token got compromised. Dunno, I feel like we should just charge for mailing lists too. Or use usenet!

bcoates 13y ago

Separate authentication from message delivery. The problem with both spam and spam mitigation measures is that the message is considered as coming 'from' a sending system instead of the actual originator of the email. Splitting these up converts one impossible problem into a tricky but mostly solved problem (delivery) and a hard problem that has to be addressed anyway (internet identity)