Scorched-Email Policy
Salon currently has an article (in its premium section) in which Jakob (I have stopped using e-mail and hired staff to do it for me
) Nielson proposes his dump-SMTP solution to spam and viruses:
It would really mean to stop accepting e-mail according to all the existing protocols. I think that the only way to do that is if you know enough important people that you want to talk to who stop using it.
My thought for how to implement this: a number of sufficiently big
organizations — AOL, Microsoft, the federal government — would have to announce that two years from now no more e-mail will be accepted.
All the companies around the world would have to upgrade.
The reason it’s impossible to really upgrade e-mail is that everybody has to upgrade at the same time. The beauty of e-mail — and it has worked fairly well for a long time — is that it’s fairly ubiquitous.
I think that it would have to be a system that has built-in security and authentication that you can always track down. You know where it’s coming from, and it’s always encrypted and always secure.
As I have pointed out previously you don’t need to shift en masse to something new. You can start start encrypting and signing email right now. You can stop reading unsigned email whenever you want. You can set up autoresponders that, instead of some challenge-response system, tell senders that un-signed mail is automatically de-prioritised.
SMTP mailservers out there are already using TLS for transport security. If AOL or Microsoft (Hotmail) was to announce that two years hence they would only accept SMTP mail using TLS then that might be the catalyst for better SMTP. And certainly more feasible than replacing it, atomically, with something else.
