October 8th, 2004
Spam: Has the answer been hiding under our noses this whole time?
Meet Todd Marshall. Marshall is one of ZDNet’s more opinionated readers and routinely takes out his whip when he thinks I’m off base. Marshall is not your ordinary armchair quarterback. He has developed his own, vector-oriented interpretive programming language called Glee that he claims is a better APL than APL. Marshall never attempts to put me in my place without provding the technical backup. For over a year now, Marshall has been telling me that, when it comes to my views on spam, I’ve got it all wrong because a suprisingly simple solution is hiding right under our noses. Today’s e-mail works off a principle known as store-and-forward. Unlike instant messaging, e-mail messages are temporarily saved on hard drives (the "store" part) before being transmitted to their recipients (the "forward" part). Marshall’s idea is very straightforward: Leave them there, on the senders’ hard drives, until the recipients ask for them. E-mail would change from a store-and-forward technology to a store-and-retrieve technology. Under this architecture, spammers can’t hide. And, without their cloaks, most spammers will disappear. At first, I rejected the idea on the basis that it would disrupt the way we expect e-mail to work. But, upon further inspection, there isn’t a single objection that can’t be gracefully managed in a way that makes the change transparent to all. If there’s something wrong with Marshall’s proposal, I can’t find it. Can you?
