Two people doing their own thing.

Microsoft Certified Partner Soul Solutions

Stop Email spam - I'm sick of it how hard could it be?

Jan 18

Written by: Soul Solutions
Thursday, 18 January 2007

johnWeeGo.jpgI'm sure many of you are in the same boat with email spam. The latest attack here is spam pretending to be a mail returned message. Well I think i have a simple idea to put an end to it.

Currently the techniques are about looking at the content or blocked lists and ...  it doesn't work. I still get spam in my mail but i also get real emails in my spam!

So I know what i would do if i could re-invent the email protocol but that is very unlikely to ever happen. So what do you think about this?

  1. Email arrives in your POP3 public mailbox (mailbox1)
  2. Program retrieves list of emails (POP3 protocol)
  3. Program checks which sender domains / address are in allowed list
  4. Program sends allowed emails to private mailbox (mailbox2) and deletes off public mailbox (mailbox1)
  5. Program emails the non-allowed email senders a templated email with a GUID in the subject line. Email says nicely "if you are not spam please replay to this email without editing the GUID in the subject line" GUID is stored against the email.
  6. Program looks for emails with GUID in subject, if GUID matches then original email is sent to private mailbox (mailbox2)
  7. After configured period of time emails that have not been approved are deleted.

User experience:

  • User has a normal email address directed to public mailbox
  • User has 2 standard POP3 mailboxes
  • User can use whatever software they like to access mail from private mailbox
  • Some interface to access the allowed / disallowed list, template and settings

What do you think? Would you be majorly put out if when you sent an email to a new contact an automated email came back and said "are you really you?". Well this could be automated too at some stage?

The point of this exercise is you know who actually sent the email so even if spam responds to your GUID your existing filters can get rid of it.

Trackback Print
Location: Blogs Soul Solutions
Tags:

2 comments so far...

Re: Stop Email spam - I'm sick of it how hard could it be?

So the news has be broken to me that this was tried in 2002 with no success. The issue seemed to be that it was too much effort to verify yourself for every new contact. Although phrases like "email servers got overrun" on one hand makes sence - effective triple the emails but I would say 95% of my email is spam so the effective benifit would outweight this.
Another really good point was that if this was widely implimented then the spammer, who clearly must make a fortune, would adapt (like a virus) and most likely start impersonating mor ligitamite email address then the garbage they currently use. This would make life even harder as your filters would be less effective.
So maybe we do need to look at changing the email protocol to have a simple integrated handshake to verify the sender with no user intervention required.

By John (SoulSolutions) on   Friday, 19 January 2007

Re: Stop Email spam - I'm sick of it how hard could it be?

The focus of most of the victims of spam is depressingly victimy - all the effort is going into adding cost and effort to the victims and innocent thrid parties.

The worlds most sophisticated defenses do not address the fundamental problem that spamming pays, and often pays very well. What is needed is a good offense - spammers need to find out that spamming hurts them.

SO?

Isn't it about time that we moved the defenses increasingly downstream and turned them into an offense. If spam comes from ISP xyz more often than not, then its time to start closing down connections from ISP xyz. SImilarly for country xyz.

This leads to the unfashionable word "responsibility" - yes ISPs, you have it. Its time you recognised that it is your users who generate the spam - either directly or as part of the zombie army.

Sadly, most global law is specifically absolving ISPs of any accountability - but clearly, there is a vast industry involved in writing about spam, selling 'defenses' for spam, charging for spam bandwidth and so on. Spam cleansing is an increasingly well paid industry. How sad. How irresponsible.


By kiwiandrewo on   Friday, 19 January 2007

Your name:
Title:
Comment:
Security Code
Enter the code shown above in the box below
Add Comment    Cancel