The purpose of this series of posts will be for me to describe a couple of ideas I’ve been playing with in relation to email and the increasing problems associated with spam.
It is my belief that these problems stem from some rather fundamental problems of the SMTP protocol itself, and some of the original design “decisions” that were made around it. I put “decisions” in quotes because I’m quite sure they weren’t actually conscious decisions that were made, but more like a consequence of the landscape at the time.
I’ll start the series off by describing the current “state-of-the-art” – where we are now, in terms of “defences” against spam, and some of the limitations of the current anti-spam techniques.
Then I’ll describe my “solution” to this problem.
At one stage, I had thought about going back to university and doing this as a thesis topic, but that seems to be less and less likely now-a-days. Even though, I’d like to get my ideas “out there” in some form.
Obviously, I’m not writing a thesis here, so I won’t go into too much depth with research – though I’ll try to do some ;) and the style of writing will be much less formal. Still, it should be quite an experience for me!
Anyway, I’m not going to write at any particular pace, just whenever I get half an hour or so free (which is actually not all that often). So please bear with me :) Hopefully this won’t be like so many things I start in my spare time and never finish!