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0 pointspbronez2mo ago0 comments

What structural changes could we make to improve the situation?

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7 comments · 4 top-level

jgalt2122mo ago· 2 in thread

Hashcash, or BTC.

ttul2mo ago

I always loved the hashcash concept and actually raised our original funding because of it (our Microsoft angels loved the idea of making spamming more expensive, and our Series A concept was tar-pitting to dissuade botnets). In the context of email sending services, we have a modern version of hashcash that we might at some point turn to. If someone can figure out how to tokenize sending at scale, then senders could pay recipients to open their emails by attaching a "tip" to each message.

If even a small fraction of legitimate email recipients altered their mail client settings to route "tipped" messages to their inbox, that would probably suffice to get senders to participate in the scheme. Senders are starved for high quality engagement data. Meanwhile, anything we can do to make spam less likely - on a relative scale - to reach the inbox in comparison to "legitimate" traffic, is a win.

drumdance2mo ago

Wow, this brings back memories. Way back in the 2000 I worked on a concept to charge “postage“ to big senders and remit payments to receivers (hosts, not end users). I also looked at hashcash. I ultimately abandoned the project because I realized I would be spending all my time convincing big senders why they should pay and I knew I would hate that job.

Previously I was the spam cop for a big sender and saw up close all the ways our clients would try to weasel around it.

b1122mo ago· 1 in thread

It's simple, there's a standard, a new one, which takes into account SPF, DKIM, DMARC, ARC, and even DANE along with upcoming and purposed SPKF, DKIM+, DMARC2, and ARCv4. It should fix just about everything.

brightball2mo ago

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/927/

ttul2mo ago

That is such a great question and there is no easy answer. There have been enormous efforts to do better for at least the last 20 years. An entire organization, M3AAWG, was founded for that reason and it meets three times a year, bringing together all the people that matter for making the situation better. It's a great organization and the people are all really smart and awesome. The IETF is no slouch either, coming up with excellent new standards and improving existing ones, such as the recent update to DKIM.

That's about as good of an answer as I can provide: keep sending smart people to the conferences!

edoceo2mo ago

Signed senders?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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