Amazing! How to eliminate spam.

[miriam_e]

I had a nap and woke wanting to go back to sleep, but my mind, operating in that weird twilight zone between full wakefulness and sleep has hit upon an amazingly simple way to eliminate spam.

I don't know why nobody has thought of this before -- it is so incredibly simple.

The big barrier to blocking spam is the fact that headers in email can be so easily forged. This has been the "reason" behind the push to eliminate anonymous communications on the net. In fact anonymity has been largely removed because when any communications travel through the net a record is kept of the machines it has passed thru on its way to you. Most spam comes from only a small number of sources. Weak laws keep them from the clutches of those of us who would gladly strangle their sociopathic necks.

But we don't need a big-brother net devoid of privacy in order to flawlessly block spam. All we need is a simple two-step process of reception and verification. We already do this in most other internet communications. For example when you receive a packet of data from a web server your computer checksums the data to make sure it is uncorrupted. Your computer then sends a signal back to ask for the next one or to resend a damaged packet. A single web page can require several packets. All this happens without you knowing it.

If we extend a variation of this to email then we can get rid of spam. It goes like this:
An email arrives at your email server. Before passing the email on to you, the server looks up the "from" address and posts a verification packet back to that address with some unique identifier of the email (a checksum or some special purpose header). If the sender's computer returns a verified "OK" signal then your email server knows the address wasn't forged.

Using this simple technique spammer's forged "from" addresses will never work ever again. If the spammer uses their real address in an attempt to get beyond this then they can be easily blocked by anti-spam software which can very quickly learn those addresses.

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... actually, maybe I missed some of the point of your reply. The server might have to record addresses in order to distinguish between a spammer operating from a server and a forged address on the same server. The server would validate that as coming from there, but the address would still be forged. Admittedly this is not likely to happen very often as I think big-time spammers usually use their own servers, like that scumbag in Florida (forgotten his name). But it could still be a possible flaw. I'll think on that further.

Thanks for the reply. :)
I like it when I'm forced to think about unforseen complications.