[Blocks-development] Thoughts on preventing 'spam'

[Michael S. <msp...@dp...>]

I've been thinking about what really comprises 'spam', and how to defend
against it.

I want my email box to be a place for a human to send me (personally and
exclusively) a message, and for me to respond back.  I don't want to receive
an automatic message that one person is broadcasting to ten thousand people.

For me, 'spam' represents a message which appears to be person-to-person,
but is really broadcast.

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Suppose that we're interested in protecting e-mail from spam.

Perhaps someone could build an extra communication step into SMTP:  the
recipient has defined a 'challenge' that requires human thought and
interpretation to respond to, but doesn't require human thought or
interpretation to authenticate the response.

Someone sending an email to me using a special email program and
communicating with my special email server would see a popup, and have to
type in the answer to a question, like "What is the singular form of the
word 'mice'?".  The question would have to be answered before the mail could
be delivered, demonstrating that the sender of the message is paying
specific attention to the recipient.

Back to the land of reality...there's actually an email service that does
something like this.  SpamCop (www.spamcop.net) has a for-pay service that
will capture and hold your email, filter out the spam, and for senders from
ISPs that are known to be frequent spammers, it sends the originator an
email asking them to open a URL in their web browser before the email is
released.

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Any thoughts about how this affects peer-to-peer filesharing?  File adverts
are most definitely broadcast messages....

--Spence
bl...@ms...