Another Idea For Stop Spam: Don't Send Mail Until It's Requested
from the hang-onto-it-for-a-bit... dept
Here comes yet another idea for stopping spam that takes a slightly different take on things. Rather than trying to block spam later down the road, the idea is to simply leave email messages on the sender's hard drive or mail server (which one isn't entirely clear, but mail server makes much more sense) and only have it sent when it's asked for. It's not explained how someone knows to ask for it, but it's likely that a subject line or some bit of info is sent earlier. You can go over the why your anti-spam method doesn't work checklist to come up with responses, but it's unclear if this really would do anything at all. First, if you're still being alerted to spam, you'd still have to delete it from your inbox. Most people never open spam anyway and delete it from the subject line, so it's unclear how the experience would be that different (okay, maybe a bit less network congestion). Second, it would still require some pretty massive changes to email systems, which could definitely hinder adoption. Finally, with so much spam coming from zombie machines, why would spammers care where the spam messages sit?
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This is ancient
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Spam - a much easier solution
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Re: Spam - a much easier solution
Individuals and companies whose customers contact them via email need to accept email from previously unknown sources -- if you want to stay in business, you don't force new customers to jump through hoops in order to contact you.
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Re: Spam - a much easier solution
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Re: Spam - a much easier solution
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It might work, but...
I have my doubts about this approach. The problem is that the sender still has to send out a notifications to the recipient and while this uses a lot less bandwidth than sending the whole message, it doesn't do anything about the problem of finding the one legitimate message in your spam-filled inbox.
Currently, I use bogofilter and it does an okay job. But to use it on a sender-stores system, I'd first have to download every notification anyway and there goes the bandwidth savings. Also, it means the sender knows I downloaded his message. Combine that with the lower cost of sending notifications and dictionary attacks become a lot more useful to spammers.
Granted, having the message reside on a fixed server might make it possible to shut down a spam before it makes any money. However, I can think of several dodges around that. You could use hacked PCs on broadband networks or servers in countries that are hard to reach legally or socially. You could claim that yes, the spam message was yours but you only sent notifications to a couple of thousand people on your mailing list and the rest are the result of some rogue spammer.
Also, it would require throwing away the entire existing e-mail infrastructure and replacing it with this. So no, I don't think it'll happen
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