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This came across my mind, when I noticed that RSS feeds can be added to Thunderbird, and look pretty much just like email.
So, to send a message:
1. I compose a message in my mail client.
2. I post the message to my server in a specific feed defined by
a from and to address combined hash with
a shared token thrown in.
3. I ping your server with the feed hash to let you know I sent something
4. You are subscribed to the RSS feed... you come pick it up... your
subscription URL would include the necessary stuff to read the feed.
The interesting thing is that you could ping a public service with the URL, and if we share a private key to access the feed.
Ex:
1. Mike - "Hi Bob" post to my blog with the shared token as the url. http://myblog.com/afc4abce78afc4abce78
2. I ping a service with the hashed addresses
http://myblog/[hashed your email + my email]
3a. You subscribe dircetly to the shared token RSS feed
OR
3b. You check the public one for the known hash
4. you download the feed item.
This doesn't solve the problem of how to get contact information from new people, but it DOES insure that your *good* communication channel is separate from your spam filled channel.
I suppose you could just have filters checking for certain keywords, and then send them and email asking them to set up a channel. once checked for spam .. the channel can be banned.
Feed-Mail: Email over RSS
http://www.feed-mail.com/ [jutta, Mar 20 2006]
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Annotation:
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I like all these spam email solutions.
There
are a great many ways to skin this
particular cat, many revolving around
the
development of a new protocol and
getting
the whole world to adopt it. It's a neat
idea
to use RSS to do this. It shouldn't be too
difficult to to rig a password protected
RSS
and/or some in-email encrption to stop
this from getting too easily hacked. |
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If an email client were written to read
this type of email, adding someone into
your address book would also subscribe
you their RSS feed. You could use a
specific format of a current email to
initiate contact with a new person.
You'd have to filter the spam from this
though. |
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One thing I'd like to see happen: the
email client should take a copy of the
message when it receives it, not only as
an archive, but to stop the sender
altering the message after receipt. |
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As so often, the spam thing is a bit of a red herring. It's already quite possible to have spam-free communication channels with known parties, just using email and client-side authentication. |
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In the extreme case, the the sender could sign their messages with their public keys; for a very soft cased, consider the end-to-end "I'm rejecting your email because I don't know you as a sender; please click here if you're for real" round trip required by some systems. |
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But I share the strong feeling that there is room for a useful crossover between RSS and individual messaging - not so much for spam-filtering, simply because this is a popular way of representing a list of structured events, and that's what arriving email is. { News - mailing lists - individual mail } is a continuum, and it's silly to switch formats halfway through. |
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