Everyone seems to have a love/hate (for some, a mostly hate) relationship with email. Some even speak of it in terms of punishments appropriate to the ninth circle of hell. I don’t get that exercised probably because I’m parsimonious about giving out my email address and don’t have a lot of spam to deal with. Others aren’t so lucky.
Lars Wirzenius says that while he may get 5 legitimate emails a day, he also gets about 400 spam emails a day. Because he’s involved with open source projects, he often gets legitimate email from people unknown to him so he can’t just delete email from anyone not in his address book. Clearly things are out of control for him so he’s considering what can be done. He has a nice post that rethinks email and how it should work.
The TL;DR is two part:
- Emails would be digitally signed
- A digital stamp, provided by the recipient would be required before an email would be accepted.
The first of those suggestions has been around for a while and suffers from what such schemes always suffer from: key control. How do you issue key pairs, make the public key generally available, and ensure that they are from whom they purport to be.
The second suggestion is new to me but, apparently, has been around for a while. The main feature of a digital stamp is that they’re completely under the control of the recipient who issues them. They can be revoked, they can be one-time-use, or even restricted to specific days or time. It seems like a good idea and easier to implement than giving everybody one or more key pairs required by the digitally signed email proposal.
Read the post for the details. I’d like to see at least some of Wirzenius’ ideas implemented. I’d especially like to see all emails signed and encrypted but besides the problems with key control there’s the fact that the big players, like Google, have no interest in allowing their users to keep information private.