There was a paper published (I think) in Communications of ACM some time
ago using this basic idea, though I can't find the exact reference, from a
group at Bell Labs.
#g
--
At 04:42 PM 11/26/02 +0000, Juergen Helbing wrote:
I hope this is not too far away from the topic of this list:
The amount of eMail spam has been reaching new levels so I want to
find a solution at least for myself - and my small company.
Did anybody already discuss/try/has experiences with "variable eMail
addresses" as a weapon for the 'enduser' ?
I am having meanwhile very good experiences with using
"one-time-mail-accounts" (on a tiny selfmade SMTP demon) - so I'd like
to know whether there is work in progress to give the user more
"power". (before I invent the wheel again :-)
This might not be directly a "message format issue" as long as the
From: header is valid.
But making changes to SMTP/POP3/mailreaders/msgformats seems to be an
impossible job nowadays - so perhaps 'bypassing' is a short-term
solution for specific applications.
Especially frequent Usenet visitors (as myself) need something before
eMail becomes finally unusable. (My mailbox today: 350 eMails, 10%
serious, 90% spam).
Some details:
I've been fooling around already with a large set of complete own
mailboxes - but this is impractical for daily use. So I'm now tending
to add "value" to the eMail addresses I'm using:
If I'm using: archiver--real(_dot_)com--30(_at_)i3w(_dot_)com
then this address is only valid for 30 days - and the incoming
messages are still placed in the mailbox "archiver".
For a reply to an unknown person I would use:
archiver--ab3123--7(_at_)i3w(_dot_)com
So the mail-address is already a 'password' for the recipient (which
is only valid for seven days ;-)
Something as "archiver--ab3123-x(_at_)i3w(_dot_)com" might be used to remove
such
an account from the mail-server.
If all this is nonsense - or if there are already bad experiences with
such methods, then please tell me and apologize my intrusion.
TIA
--
Juergen
-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK(_at_)NineByNine(_dot_)org>