Scarecrow Man Posted October 15, 2004 Report Share Posted October 15, 2004 A software developer by the name of Todd Marshall has come up with an ingenious way of dealing with spam.To understand his idea, you need to understand how email works. When I send you an email, my email server sends the entire email to your ISP's email server. Your email program then downloads the email and (hopefully) you read it. While the email will always end up on your email server, it can be sent literally from anywhere in the world. Todd Marshall's idea is to reverse this process. Rather than delivering the entire email to your ISP's mail server, under Marshall's process my email server would send a notice to your's saying that I have sent an email. Once you or your email program decide to receive it, it connects to my server and downloads the email. This has several advantages that I can see. First, it would make it nearly impossible to spoof an email address. And even if the email address were spoofed, it wouldn't matter. You have to know where the server is in order to download from it. That makes it very easy to block that particular server. Second, it would greatly reduce the bandwidth and storage strain being felt by email providers and Internet Service Providers. If a spammer sends out 10 million spams, only a short notice actually crosses the network. If you know it is from a spammer and do not want to download it, you don't. There may be flaws with this idea. I don't know enough about networking or email to see any myself. From the little I do know, this looks like an excellent and relatively simple way to crack down on spam. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
expertec Posted October 15, 2004 Report Share Posted October 15, 2004 Interesting concept, but can it work? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andsome Posted October 15, 2004 Report Share Posted October 15, 2004 With Mailwasher I look at the e-mails on NTL's site and decide whether or not I want to receive them, so what's the advantage to me? Also since changing my e-mail address to something which an auto dialler is far less likely to chance upon, I have not received any spam for months, after reaching more than 100 per day. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cd108 Posted October 15, 2004 Report Share Posted October 15, 2004 Lots of people arent so lucky though andsome, and in a phsyical sense spam and other malware traffic is slowing the internet down consideraly. Nice to see someone trying to come up with a solution other than ignoring it and hoping it will go away. Hope they can make it work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
homecomputeraid Posted October 23, 2004 Report Share Posted October 23, 2004 There's no direct, or immediate advantage to you personally the way things work right now Andsome. The advantage would be that your service provider wouldn't need as powerful an e-mail platform, or as much hardware to process e-mail, with the proposed scheme.It seems like it's a long way from reality though, since it would require a lot of new standards about how e-mail is processed. Cool idea though.Sincerely, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andsome Posted October 23, 2004 Report Share Posted October 23, 2004 If only all the countries of the world would get together and make spamming illegal, there would be no problem. Obviously I appreciate that this will unfortunately never happen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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