I have been thinking about ways to alter email programs (readers, servers, protocols) so that sending spam would be more difficult, and hopefully more expensive and less feasible for spammers. Yes, this is a tremendously difficult problem, but it is also a very important one, so much so that I am surprised it hasn’t been solved already.
A friend posted this link which is a filtering system based on this idea. It’s a very interesting way to judge whether something is spam based on parsing out all the words and tokens from two large containers of mail: one with spam, and one with your legitimate mail. It’s a cool idea because it is adaptive, and the criteria is set by each user (or each group that chooses to share info about good and bad messages).
However, I still think that we need to start thinking about the next generation of mail servers and how they are going to behave. Email is such a great productivity tool, even with the spam, but it is quickly becoming harder to use (and more expensive) due to spammers.
Here are my thoughts on how to improve the email infrastructure…