Spam is not an intrinsic property of the bits or the message. It is a
property of the relationship between the sender and the recipient. The
problem is that the recipients have give up all control because they
have one magic name that can be used to reach them 24x7. Actually there
are a few of them, the phone number being another example.
One way to find a balance is to take control over our exposure by
getting past the current model of email which is based on the old
timesharing user account mixed in with a confused model of the post
office and phone number. The result is a system with all the limits of
their physical predecessors but without the controls (which were often
just the degree of inconvenience).
Rather than email addresses we would have access tokens or capabilities
that we can manage. The equivalent of the current email address would be
the lookup handle in a database that yields a unique capability that
contains information such as its source (a directory).
As with MIME, one can implement this scheme fairly transparently by
using the existing address string as a capability handle with routing
information. The @ is just noise since the final delivery point is not
the first SMTP server. If we couple this with removing the semantics
from the DNS (as William the Conqueror did for surnames in the Domesday
book) we'd get added benefits such as stable email handles.
More on this in
http://www.frankston.com/public/writing.asp?name=spamfixation
A related issue is getting rid of the semantics that have befouled the
DNS - http://www.frankston.com/public/writngs.asp?name=dotdns.
The goal is to separate the mechanisms from the policies. You can have
whatever policy you want once you have some control over your exposure.
You can do things like charging for priority access or you can keep some
capabilities very secret.
By separating the problem of finding you (the human memorable email
address and far better ways to find and remember you) from the mechanics
of the address we can do a lot more than dealing spam, we can start to
explore the potential of email instead of settling for a recycled hack
from the 60's.
Bob Frankston
rmf19(_at_)bobf(_dot_)frankston(_dot_)com