Eat My Business

OK - i’ve thought about this for all of 10 mins and think it could be a winner.

Anti-Spam Ideas :  A Reply-to Address that Expires

I’m currently going through the process of purging some of my lesser-used email accounts on one of my domain names.

The amount of spam I’m receiving is driving me nuts. My Bayesian Spam Filter (probably inspired by the seminal work of Paul Graham) is good, but it still saps up my time.

Some accounts are getting one genuine email to every thousand spams.

I’m going to have to just ditch some of my email accounts. Then, hope that any genuine (non-spam) correspondents who still write to them will spot the ‘delivery status notification failed‘ notice (amongst all the spoofs) and have the energy to try to contact me by other means.

I’d love it if I could add a commonly-understood flag (in the outgoing email headers) to announce to clients when the email account is likely to expire.

Then plugins added to email clients, like Outlook, can then read it and indicate the alive/dead status of the email address.

Perhaps a simple lighter shading of an email address could be enough to get the message across.

Or - in its most intrusive form - a user can then hit reply and see a notice saying something on the lines of

“You are about to send an email to an account that is likely to not exist anymore:
What do you want to do?
—————
[send anyway]
[]tick to listen for failure notices
—–OR —-
[cancel]
visit the domain to find alternative form of contact
—————-

* I think its a politer way of doing things. In website terms - A bit like a ‘planned outage for maintenance’ versus a ’sudden 404 error’.

* It can be widely adopted without a change to SMTProtocol

* It accepts that spam is here to stay - and acknowledges that email addresses are ephemeral

* Perhaps even the spammers might pick up on it and actually decide to skip sending anything to blackholes. (Or demand their money back from a hacker if they bought a dud list)

So there we are.

* Is this a crazy stupid idea?
* Has it been done already?

Tell me what you think!

p.s I’ll sleep on it and  see if it makes sense in the morning ;o)

Follow up 10 mins later:

problems:

* knowledge is power - in the sense that spammers might concentrate on email addresses that do not specify an expire date - e.g personal gmails and hotmails. Hence the problem is not solved , but shifted. ;o(

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 12:36 pm and is filed under email accounts, anti-spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.