heironymouscoward's Journal: Building an email meta-negotiation protocol

I have an idea for a secure email system. It is this. Every email sent to me will come on a new, unique, one-time email address. My email server will recognize the address, and the sender, and on that basis accept the email or reject it. The meta-negotiation process allows people to get an email address on which to contact me. In the simplest fashion, they simply copy the address from my website, where a form asks them to first enter their email address, then provides them with an email address they can use. In a more sophisticated set-up, this hand-shaking can be established between an email client and my email server prior to sending an email.

Depending on the manner in which the email address was obtained, incoming emails can be certified as more or less trusted. Thus emails from business aquaintances, whose public keys are encoded in my email server, are highly trusted. Emails from unknown persons checking my website are less trusted.

The beauty of this implementation is that it does not need any changes to the existing email protocols. It does require some work on the email server side, and it does rather mess with the notion of "email address" as something constant. Small prices to pay for getting a clean inbox.

Hmm.

[turg]

I get alot of mail from people writing their e-mail on a company system (e.g. Lotus Notes) from a machine that has no real-time/direct connection to the Internet. They cannot access web sites, their e-mail client doesn't connect directly to the Internet (it hands off mail to the company mail gateway) and couldn't if it wanted to because doesn't even speak SMTP anyway (e.g. Lotus Notes).

Trust...

[MarkusQ]

Just because a message is from someone you know and trust does not mean that you can trust the message. I know people who I would let borrow my car, take my wallet, or even browse my library without batting an eye but from whom (due mostly to their choice of operating system or mail client) I will not open random messages on an arbitrary client (instead I usually preview them in pine).

-- MarkusQ

RE:Futurology

[Alucard454]

RE:Futurology Friday October 31, @08:29AM JE has been archived, blah blah blah. Just wanted to say how interesting I found your predictions. Though I think your timeline for FOSS v M$ may be perhaps a little optimistic, I think your overall predictions are spot-on. Regardless, I'll be watching as the year goes by. :) (and yes, i made an account just so i could post this as something other than an AC. you should feel special :P)