The “solution” to the problem of spam has a number of requirements on it. Here I’ll list my basic requirements, numbered for easy reference, along with a brief description of why I think the requirement is important. So, in no particular order:
- Compatible with existing email clients. This is a no-brainer, nobody will use the new protocol if they have to upgrade all their email clients. Notice that I’m only saying email clients – obviously we’re going to have to do something with our servers, but as long as the clients don’t need to change, I think we’ll be OK.
- Email remains “free.” People like the fact that they can send an email anywhere in the world for free. There have been suggestions in the past that charging for email would stop spam. While it might actually work, it has problems associated with it. If you’re not charging actual money (which would be silly anyway: where does the money go?) you may charge “time” – i.e. force the sender to solve some puzzle that takes a few seconds. It’d slow the spammer down who sends a million messages (though probably not enough that they’d care – what spammer would care if their run took 1 hour or 48 hours?); but what about legitimate bulk-senders (such as mailing lists). I guess you could work out exceptions to the rule, but the exception would be managed on the client and you can’t expect everyone who subscribes to a mailing list to exclude that server from their “solve-the-puzzle” requirement.
- Email should remain anonymous. This one is tricky, but when I say “anonymous” what I mean is that you shouldn’t have to provide a real name, address, telephone number, etc. I believe that identity is important – that is, being able to tell one sender from another, but actually linking that identity to a real person is not so important.
- Bulk email should still be possible. As I mentioned in point #2, there are legitimate reasons for sending bulk email. Mailing lists is one. “legitimate” marketing material is another (for example, I drive a Peugeot, and they send me an email every month with various bits of Peugeot news – I want to keep getting those).
- Unsolicited email should still be possible. That is, I should be able to click on the email address of a web page’s webmaster’s email address and send them an email. I wrote an article for GameDev.net back in 2003, and to this day I still get questions from people reading it (not so much anymore, maybe one every couple of months or so). I don’t want to lose that ability.
- Unsolicited bulk email should not be possible. That is what spam is.
Implementing these requirements is no short order, so lets see how we go :)