Kee Hinckley <nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com> writes:
[...]
In the case of a person that I don't know, that means that they will
have to provide a summary of *why* they want to talk to me.
(E.g. reporting a bug in your software, your system sent me a virus,
our company changed its name, this is your grandmother sending mail
from a cruise ship....).
I see absolutely no way to provide that information without providing
a big enough window for spammers to send ads.
What am I missing?
I don't think you're missing anything.
One answer is that a consent system (or an alternative to the existing
infrastructure) allows reliable separation of email that you know you
want to receive, and the rest.
As you point out, that leaves the unexpected message from your
cruising grandmother along with the viagra ads, where you'll probably
never see it.
One possibility is the idea of introduction: your grandmother sends an
email to some mutual acquaintance, who forwards it to you. Oops, that
probably wouldn't work in this case, but it would work in the more
normal case where nobody is travelling. I'm not convinced that would
work, whether formalised in some way (so the MUA can provide help) or
not. These chains of trust and things just don't seem to have been
that successful, IMHO.
Another is to introduce some kind of payment (estamps, or hashcash
(proof of work), or similar). That still allows unsolicited ads, but
it should reduce the insane volumes to a more acceptable level. A
consent system can be used there, too, to indicate the cost of getting
you to see unsolicited email.
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