Laith Zraikat

In response to Zeid Nasser's topic "Spam: A thing of the past!", I thought I'd share some thoughts on the topic:

Indeed SPAM is a huge burden for individuals and corporations, especially those providing e-mail services.

Everything people have been talking about to fight spam seems promising, but I'm sure that just as companies like Microsoft are developing anti-spam technologies, there are others focused on breaking through any new anti spam technology. Even the human challenge idea -which I like very much- can eventually be broken.

However, I have been reading more and more about an approach which I think could mark the end of spam once and for all. This approach suggests replacing SMTP with an RSS-like protocol.

There are three main problems which make spamming so easy;

1. Technology has enabled spammers to provide a fake e-mail address and mask their trails.
2. Email is virtually free.
3. With SMTP, the entire e-mail is transferred to your inbox, and by the time all spam email has been sent, the spammer has taken off and can't be tracked because there's no need to remain in the same location.

Let's take the RSS approach; RSS is completely opt-in, which means that you can choose what email to receive just like you choose what news gets into your feed reader. And while SMTP transports the entire email to your inbox after which it gets deleted from the originating server, RSS still requires you to go and fetch the rest of the content -being it news or whatever- from the server of origin.

This to me is the key ingredient in this anti-spam antidote. The fact that the content of the email is required to remain on the sender's server and be fetched by the recipient will mean three things:

1. Spammers can't give a fake email address to mask their location when sending emails. They have to provide the proper location when the content of their emails resides
2. Spammers have to maintain a permanent location from which people can download their content, which means they can't just run away.
3. Spammers will get charged for the emails when they are downloaded. Just like any other web site is charged for its bandwidth.

So here we have it, the perfect solution for spam. It won't be easy to implement because it means that all e-mail servers will have to ditch the SMTP and adopt the new RSS protocol. I won’t be surprised if this is one of the solutions Microsoft is working on.