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RSS feed based email

Use RSS feeds to communicate spammlessly
  (+4)
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This came across my mind, when I noticed that RSS feeds can be added to Thunderbird, and look pretty much just like email.

So, to send a message:

1. I compose a message in my mail client. 2. I post the message to my server in a specific feed defined by a from and to address combined hash with a shared token thrown in. 3. I ping your server with the feed hash to let you know I sent something 4. You are subscribed to the RSS feed... you come pick it up... your subscription URL would include the necessary stuff to read the feed.

The interesting thing is that you could ping a public service with the URL, and if we share a private key to access the feed.

Ex:

1. Mike - "Hi Bob" post to my blog with the shared token as the url. http://myblog.com/afc4abce78afc4abce78 2. I ping a service with the hashed addresses http://myblog/[hashed your email + my email] 3a. You subscribe dircetly to the shared token RSS feed OR 3b. You check the public one for the known hash 4. you download the feed item.

This doesn't solve the problem of how to get contact information from new people, but it DOES insure that your *good* communication channel is separate from your spam filled channel.

I suppose you could just have filters checking for certain keywords, and then send them and email asking them to set up a channel. once checked for spam .. the channel can be banned.

bigattichouse, Jan 06 2006

Feed-Mail: Email over RSS http://www.feed-mail.com/
[jutta, Mar 20 2006]

[link]






       I like all these spam email solutions. There are a great many ways to skin this particular cat, many revolving around the development of a new protocol and getting the whole world to adopt it. It's a neat idea to use RSS to do this. It shouldn't be too difficult to to rig a password protected RSS and/or some in-email encrption to stop this from getting too easily hacked.   

       If an email client were written to read this type of email, adding someone into your address book would also subscribe you their RSS feed. You could use a specific format of a current email to initiate contact with a new person. You'd have to filter the spam from this though.   

       One thing I'd like to see happen: the email client should take a copy of the message when it receives it, not only as an archive, but to stop the sender altering the message after receipt.   

       [+]
st3f, Jan 06 2006
  

       As so often, the spam thing is a bit of a red herring. It's already quite possible to have spam-free communication channels with known parties, just using email and client-side authentication.   

       In the extreme case, the the sender could sign their messages with their public keys; for a very soft cased, consider the end-to-end "I'm rejecting your email because I don't know you as a sender; please click here if you're for real" round trip required by some systems.   

       But I share the strong feeling that there is room for a useful crossover between RSS and individual messaging - not so much for spam-filtering, simply because this is a popular way of representing a list of structured events, and that's what arriving email is. { News - mailing lists - individual mail } is a continuum, and it's silly to switch formats halfway through.
jutta, Jan 08 2006
  
      
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