Final, free antispam solution soon coming
Many specialists say that spam will continue to be a hard problem for at
least two years or so, as new extensions of the SMTP protocol to provide
sender authentication or other things will take that time to be made and
widespread. And that it costs and will continue to cost billions of dollars
throughout the world. All that fuss for this ridiculous question of deciding
whether a message is bulk or not.
I don't care about this (which I see as quite funny in fact), as I'm going
to release a completely
different solution, based on a new, completely different protocol under
GNU GPL. It will not even be a protocol to send messages, as messages will
not be "sent" in my solution.
The only drawback of my proposition, in the short term, will be that it will
be all web-based so you cannot handle your messages offline. Apart from this,
I think it will only have advantages. In particular, users will not have
to download any particular software: the new software are for web servers,
and users do everything simply by their usual web navigator with sessions
cookies (so in particular, can acceess their messages from cybercafes).
For starting a correspondence with someone, you do not "send" him a message,
but you open a private forum where you put your message, and you invite him
to read it, that is, apart from you, only he can access it by the web by
clicking on the link from his board to your server, which transmits a crypted
authentication request between servers, so that your server will verify his
identity.
This way, of course no message can be "sent" from an unknown source, since
to access the message one must request it from the host of the sender, and
therefore know which host it is. Even titles (subjects) to invite the receiver
to read the message, will be sent authenticated (crypted with symmetric key
between servers). More generally, opening the invitations to a given forum
to a larger set of people will be a good replacement for mailing lists, combining
the advantages of forums or online communities with the commodity of having
all one's new or old messages to read whatever their source, by simple clicks
of mouse from one's unique personal board.
Invitations systems between users of a host and between hosts ensures the
openness of the system (the possibility for every honest person to open an
account), while closing it from spammers (their account would be terminated
if they started spamming, by the server administrator interested that the
server not be banned from the network).
The trees of invitations will be recorded, as well the internal invitation
tree between users inside each server (visible by the admin of the server),
and the invitation tree between servers (where the invitations of a new server
by an existing server are all those that all users of that server make, the
question of who precisely made the invitation being only visible by its root),
so that bad invitations, whether it be invitation of a spammer, or any set
of fake automatic invitations, can be tracked back to whoever is at the origin
of them.
This was the explanation of the antispam functionality.
But this project will be interesting for many other reasons. One thing is
that it will be no more necessary for people to invent different passwords
for all their accounts: they have their central account and through it can
be authentified all over the web (well, only on servers that will recognize
this protocol of course) without the trouble of wondering if all servers
are trustworthy or not - for each person, the only important thing is to
trust his own central board.
See more details and features on the description page of this trust-forum project.