On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Matt Sergeant wrote:
What about address books? And people who give other people your address?
Ah. This is solved by having different classes of addresses.
Consider a Domain-locked address. The address
"ephem-ajh4u34b(_at_)roaringpenguin(_dot_)com" only accepts mail from the
roaringpenguin.com domain. That's the address that gets published
in the internal company directory. (For that matter, for the internal
company directory, you might as well use "dfs(_at_)roaringpenguin(_dot_)com").
Domain-locked addresses are also good if you're communicating with
several people at another organization. Yes, if one of those people
tries to email you from a Yahoo account, it will bounce. Well, too bad.
Sender-locked addresses are more restricted. The address
"ephem-dkn435nfu(_at_)roaringpenguin(_dot_)com" only accepts mail from
"rose(_at_)artandframingsolutions(_dot_)com", period. She can keep that address
in her address book, and it will work just fine.
Time-locked addresses are what you post in newsgroups. They accept mail
from anyone, but only for a very limited time.
Challenge-locked addresses are what you use for your permanent point
of contact for strangers. Challenge-locked addresses send a challenge
back to senders; if the challenge is met successfully, the sender is
given a sender-locked address to use. Later on, you might
magnanimously hand out a domain-locked address, if you choose.
Depending on your policy, you might have sender-locked addresses issue
a challenge if the wrong sender tries to use them; this covers the
innocent case of someone giving out your address to a friend.
There's a terrific side-benefit from sender-locked addresses: If your
correspondent is silly enough to use M$ LookOUT!, and gets hit by a
virus, a nice thing happens: Most viruses nowadays pick two random
addresses from the address book. They use one as the sender and the
other as the recipient.
Well, mail (supposedly) NOT from rose(_at_)(_dot_)(_dot_)(_dot_) to
ephem-dkn... will bounce.
Furthermore, by looking at the destination address, you can phone up
rose@ and say "I think you might have a virus; please check", whereas
currently, you have few clues as to who the real infected party is.
Locked-addresses require no MUA changes. All of the magic can be
implemented on the server.
To get back to the broader picture mandated by the charter: Rather
than looking hard for ways to tie down an address to an identity, so
that we can track persistent spammers, it might be much easier and
just as productive to look for ways to dissociate e-mail addresses
from any kind of permanent identity, ensuring that spammers' lists are
rendered useless, and amplifying the effectiveness of the
measure-bounce-percentage proposal I made earlier.
--
David.
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