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Supposedly one of the main problems with spam is the wastage of network bandwidth. I propose a system whereby email is kept in an "Outbox" on your ISP's mail server and a note is sent to the recipient to retrieve it. This could be transparent to the end user as they could just click to open and the mail
would load in their client much like a web page does.
A token could be encrypted using the recipients (/ISP's) certificate that would be necessary to retrieve the mail. We would still receive tonnes of spam headers in our in-boxes but the Net would not have to bear unwanted messages. This would rely on mail servers being constantly online but that is no different to the current system.
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I (wrongly) believe(d) that this is widely baked, try a web search for IMAP. Or web-based email. |
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P.S., welcome to the Halfbakery. |
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IIRC IMAP still transmits the message across the Net to your mail server so it still creates an unnecessary bandwidth sink. |
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A) Webmail
B) What's the point of sending a message to notify someone they have e-mail? |
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With a more critical reading of your idea, I realize that you meant for the email sender’s ISP to hold the email. So that YourIdea:IMAP::IMAP:POP3. |
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This would cause spam to sit at the spammer’s ISP, and therefore be less of a burden to the spammee’s ISP, provided that the notification and retrieval electronic mailings required less total bandwidth than the spam email itself would have required. |
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I maintain that one of the main problems with spam is the system bandwidth it consumes. |
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Yes, [zobier], but for many of us it constitutes a very low bandwidth overhead, by comparison with our other bandwidth consuming activities (like graphics file transfer). Like [jutta], I resent the time I spend identifying and deleting it. The volume of traffic it consumes though? Negligible. |
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Most spam messages are short, so sending a short notification message wouldn't save much bandwidth. It would worsen the impact of spam on people though, becuse right now you can use bayesian-filters like Spamassassin to filter out 99% of the spam without having to see it. That wouldn't work anymore. |
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Plus for servers the bottleneck is typically the number of connections open rather than bandwidth. Your scheme would require one extra connection to be made for every piece of mail. |
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"right now you can use bayesian-filters like Spamassassin to filter out 99% of the spam without having to see it. That wouldn't work anymore." Good point [vp], thanks. |
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This has been independently invented by many people. It's often referred to as a "pull delivery system", versus today's SMTP, which is "push delivery". |
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See http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html for probably the best-known proposal along these lines. |
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I like this because the spammer has to stick around to deliver the emails properly, while they can hit and run with the conventional system. |
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Of course it will probably be zombie computers that do the actual sticking around, but if they were compromised by a spammer they can be compromised by us and we can put a messagebox on their screen saying "your computer has been compromised by a spammer". Which might encourage them to secure their computers. |
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