admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I think to need an new e-mail rules, to stop this madness. I call it application card.
Nice try, and I can say for sure that the basis of your idea is good enough to make products that people were willing to pay for... a few years ago. Unfortunately it makes one or two classic mistakes, which have been figured out in the meantime.
If I understand rightly, it depends on spammers to go along with it, sending an application instead of a plain email. If they were that civil, the entire spam problem would have dried right up shortly after people started objecting to it. If you mean that the user would set it up in such a way that this would be automagically enforced for all new contacts, that relieves the dependence on the civility of the obviously uncivil.
Even then, though, the mechanism itself has been thought of before. It's generally called challenge-response. It may be acceptable for people who receive a tiny volume of unsolicited but desired email, or solicited email from new contacts. However, for the rest of us, it doesn't work very well. It imposes a burden, small but tiresome, on our new correspondents, that many are not willing to bear. In fact, much of the email we want to get, is sent by automated mechanisms that simply *cannot* respond to it.
(Some might think that the answer is to establish standards for the format of the challenges and responses, so that these automated systems can respond. I think it's a pretty safe bet that the spammers would then start using such systems. Back to Square One, just with a lot more money down yet another rathole, and more pain for the innocent. A while back I gave some thought to designing standards for signing up for automated emails, in such a way that the source would be automagically added to your "whitelist". That never really got anywhere either, but I suspect that it also would have been abusable by spammers.)
Lastly, unless the request cards folder, with its many subfolders, is going to be managed automagically by the email program, this sounds rather unwieldy.
The spam problem is deceptively simple-looking from the point of view of the typical user, or even administrator. I suggest you check out the Internet *Research* Task Force's working group on spam, called the Anti-Spam Research Group or ASRG. Their home page is at http://asrg.sp.am/. A lot of it consists (or at least when I hung out there, consisted) of going round and round in circles, actually accomplishing very little, but you can learn a lot from the discussions, about how complex the problem really is, what has been tried, and why certain approaches are absolutely doomed.
-Dave (no, not that one, no, not that other one, the other other one) -- Dave Aronson "Specialization is for insects." -Heinlein Work: http://www.davearonson.com/ Play: http://www.davearonson.net/ _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf