[ih] The Decline and Fall of Internet Email?

[John Levine]

It appears that Bill Woodcock via Internet-history <woody at pch.net> said:
>So, what to do about it?  
>
>One approach would be using an end-to-end overlay, and (for instance) not send or accept any email which wasn’t PGP-encrypted. ...

This is unfortunately another one of those Well Known Bad Ideas. There
is no reason to assume that authenticated or encrypted mail is mail
you want since bad guys can do that, too. Considering the amount of
malicious mail, you want some sort of malware filter, but you can't do
that without decrypting it first.

A related approach is only accept mail from people you know, but that
replaces the spam problem with the introduction problem which is, if
anything, harder.  Or you give up and, as you note, only talk to
people within your bubble.

While I don't think there is a general solution to the spam problem,
some of the related issues have solutions that are frustratingly close
to easy. For example, the entire mailing list problem would be solved
if lists could wrap messages sort of like single-message digests. The
wrapping is easy, MIME rfc822 attachments were defined in the 1990s.
But hardly any user mail programs and no web mail display them well
and even fewer treat the wrapped messsages as messages and let you
reply to them. So we're stuck.

We put a lot of discussion of this stuff on the ASRG wiki.  It hasn't been
updated in a long time, but nothing of importance has changed.

https://wiki.asrg.sp.am

(If anyone would like to update it, ask me for a password.)

R's,
John