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October 26, 2004
Spam: leave it to the sender
You know the feeling: wake up one morning with one great ideea in mind and rush to the computer. If you are a developer, you pop up your favourite text (or hex) editor and start coding. Perl, Python, AWK, asm, you name it. Or, if you are not blessed with the c0d1ng skillz, you can write about the ideea. Such as the following:
In short, the ideea is to replace e-mails with small (even fixed sized) notifications. Then, let the recipient fetch the message if he seems to like the sender. In theory, this sounds nice. Reduce the traffic, ban the offending senders on a mass level, basically, kill spam. On the other side, it has some drawbacks. Instead of finding 100 spam e-mails each morning, you'll find 100 spam notifications. To fetch the e-mails you like you need to do twice the work. Bye-bye privacy too, the sender will know when you go for his message. And for big e-mails, you need to wait... Not to mention that you need a completely new communication protocol to support it. Which if properly implemented, can kill spam anyway. Oh well.
Posted by Costin Raiu at October 26, 2004 12:10 PM