bla.st : how to stop email spam, worldwide, for good.

Today we are going to present a possible permanent solution to Email Spam. "How hard could it be?" we thought to ourselves. The current system is obviously broken. No laws or legislation will stop, or even slow bulk unsolicited email. The solution presented here is a broad concept, that offers a good balance of compatibility with existing email systems, and is technically easy to implement. The most difficult changes will be social change.

The solution: Whitelists.

In email, a whitelist is usually a list of email addresses you accept mail from. Whitelists exist today, but few people use them, and they are usually server based.

We need to change email clients, such as Microsfot Outlook, Apple Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird, so they use whitelists to accept mail. Whitelists should be enabled by default. It would mean by defualt, you can only receive email from people you have added to your address book.

Changing to a permission based email system, from the completely open system we have today would be a massive change. So what would be the advantages of this system?

No major changes in infrastructure needed, although it could be helpful
Only small changes would be needed to existing email clients. Some clients could be configured as they are already.
We can keep the same email addresses
You can get spam if you want it.
This system could be optional, your friends might use it but you don't have to. You'll get tons of spam of course if you don't.

So what problems this system would face?

Social Change. This would be the biggest hurdle. People expect to be able to send a message to anyone else. Having them to request permission first is a massive change. Instructions could be automatically sent in reply for people who don't know.
If a spammer knows your friends email address, and your address, they can send you spam. This highlights another flaw with email, the fact anyone can send email pretending to be from someone else (see below).
Suddenly changing cold turkey means you may miss important emails if you haven't added the sender to your whitelist. This could be alleviated by slowly migrating from a normal address to a whitelist only address.
Websites and automated email systems can't assume messages will get through any more. Web applications and services would have to be redesigned to ensure the user manually adds the sending email address to their whitelist.

For the concept to work, a couple of other problems would need to be solved:

Currently anyone can send an email pretending to be from someone else. We would need some way of stopping that, so that if you receive an email from Bob, you know it's from Bob. Something like PGP, but it would need to way simpler.
We would still need a way to get in touch with people we have never met before. With websites, blogs, social networks, chat systems, VOIP and of course ordinary telephones, this is getting easier every day.

Eventually if everyone used such a system, sending junk mail would be a waste of time. You would only receive mail from people you actually want to receive mail from. If you want to try out the system, it's possible to set up filters to bounce any email from someone not in your address book. If this was the default and normal, it could just work.

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How to stop email spam, worldwide, for good.

The solution: Whitelists.