POLLARD’S NAIVE PROPOSAL TO SAVE E-MAIL

Posted on October 13, 2003 by Dave Pollard

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There’s a great debate in the blogosphere and among technologists about whether e-mail, much disparaged as the cause of productivity-sapping information overload, and a lightning rod for relentless and overwhelming spam merchants, is toast. Detractors say it is unrescuable, an inefficient use of time and an ineffectual means of communication. Supporters say it is the inevitable and powerful successor and replacement for snail mail, and must be redesigned to solve the problems that are preventing it from doing its critical job, which is (as shown on the chart above, from my earlier post) — ubiquitous, fast, free 1-to-1 (or 1-to-a-few) (but short, non-critical, non-iterative) written communication.

Like Clay Shirky, I love e-mail, warts and all. Some of the things that e-mail has allowed me, and those in my communities, to accomplish that no other medium could have achieved:

  1. Strengthened relationships and improved dialogue with readers of our Salon blogs.
  2. Pressured the Canadian government to fundamentally change its position on several key matters such as the Kyoto Accord.
  3. Enabled readers of my genealogy site to contact and exchange critical information with me.
  4. Enabled me to conduct targeted surveys of Salon bloggers.
  5. Enabled my high-school graduating class to organize an amazingly successful reunion.
  6. Helped establish and strengthen communication and collaboration among many loosly-knit communities of which I am a member.

So I want to save e-mail. I think we need to either fix the problems plaguing e-mail (info overload, spam and abuse), or develop a substitute tool that fills the void its demise would leave.

I think a possible answer to spam and info overload is a simple concept I call transient subdomains. Here’s what I mean by this term:

What do we do now when we get too much spam in a mailbox? We trash it and set up a new one. It’s a one-step-ahead-of-the-enemy approach, but it’s extravagent. Suppose instead of just assigning people an e-mail address, we assigned them an e-mail domain, with the ability to set up an infinite number of subdomains (or channels, if you prefer), each with a short and finite life.

Example: Let’s say my e-mail address is dave.pollard@hotmail.com (it isn’t — I use my real e-mail address sparingly in public because of spam etc.) Instead of junking this address when the spammers overwhelm it, suppose instead I had an e-mail domain: dave.pollard@hotmail.com/ and could create any subdomains I want, and abandon them when they’ve lost their value.

So for example right now I’m interested in people’s opinions on my novel-in-progress. With transient subdomains I could request them at  dave.pollard@hotmail.com/WhatCouldBe. And I occasionally help out Mark Hoback by co-editing Virtual Occoquan, the online periodical, and I would be able to communicate with potential authors of the next edition at dave.pollard@hotmail.com/VO28.

And I’m collaborating on some Social Networking and Social Software developments with a small group of people in two distinct communities (one consisting of people I regularly meet in person, the second of people I’ve never met but who have expertise the first group lacks), so I could communicate with them under the subdomains dave.pollard@hotmail.com/SocialNet1 and dave.pollard@hotmail.com/SocialNet2.

Not only do I think transient subdomains could save e-mail from lamentable extinction, I think the same concept applied to phone numbers could save us from telemarketers as well.

OK, I’m done. I told you it was a naive proposal. Now I’m looking to those that understand the technical workings of e-mail and telephony to tell me whether it could work, technically. And for the twisted minds out there to tell me how the spammers could get around it.

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8 Responses to POLLARD’S NAIVE PROPOSAL TO SAVE E-MAIL

  1. Jon Husband says:
    October 13, 2003 at 09:07

    I like it. It feels to me, as I read your description, as an effective adaptive behaviour, if it were put into practice by many.The ways we adapt, individually and socially, are often found, over time, as the most simple,sensible, and practical ways to use and do become apparent.Thanks – I’ll bet it will work well.

  2. Sean says:
    October 13, 2003 at 09:49

    This sounds like a great idea, Dave. Subdomains are virtually free as it is, and while there is a finite number available, this will have to be addressed at some point, anyways.I wonder, though, if the finite lifespan of email channels results in the same problem that switching to another email address does. What happens to email sent to an address after it’s no longer functional? Someone commmunicating with you on a certain project might find the need to contact you again, even though the project is completed. Given the nature of spam, that is, its ability to function is reliant on mass distribution, I’m hopeful about solutions based on distributed computing (such as Spamnet [http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/]).

  3. Doug Alder says:
    October 13, 2003 at 21:40

    OK – but the way you have them written isn’t subdomains Dave – you have ttmem written as directories. To use your example – dave.pollard@hotmail.com/WhatCouldBe should be dave.pollard@WhatCouldBe.hotmail.com – subdomains precede the primary domain.

  4. Ton Zijlstra says:
    October 14, 2003 at 07:41

    Whenever I’m requested an e-mail address on some website or form, I consider using which one. As my ISP gives me limitless e-mail addresses, and I also own a few domainnames, of course also with limitless e-mail adresses, what I do is e.g. use register@….. when registering somewhere to visit once or twice. All mail to register@ I’ll ignore from then on in my in-box. For amazon, as I’m in their Associate program I use amazon@…… , for my blog it’s blog@….. So in fact I practically do what David proposes. As soon as an e-mail address has outlived it’s usefullness, I either filter it out, or let it bounce back to sender.

  5. Nat Irons says:
    October 14, 2003 at 11:23

    qmail, a fine mail server for unix/linux/bsd, allows you to delineate namespaces within email addresses, using hyphens. Say I own foo.com and I set up an account for alice@foo.com. Alice buys something from amazon, which demands her email address. She can give them alice@foo.com, or she can give them something unique, for example, alice-amazon@foo.com. She could go crazy and give them alice-amazon-october@foo.com if she wanted to change the address every time she bought a different book. By default, all email starting with “alice-” will get routed to alice@foo.com.The first cool thing about this is that it requires no setup. Once alice@foo.com has been created, any alice-whatever addresses are routed automatically.The second cool thing is that any subset of addresses can be easily routed to different places — to another email address, to a file on disk, to a unix program, or to oblivion. If a subaddress winds up taking too much spam, you can direct it to /dev/null. Looking for a unique receiving address can also remove all ambiguity from filters in email clients. And it doesn’t require that each user own their own domain or risk collisions.I use this a lot. My web/mail host, pair networks, has run qmail for several years.

  6. Rob Paterson says:
    October 15, 2003 at 03:48

    I have MaCafee Spamkiller isnatlled and it is breaking down under the assault. My wife Robin is trying “Knowspam” this uses an intersting idea. It does not try and out think the spammer. It allows all senders through who are in your trusted list. Each new sender has to answer a question that cannot be answered by a machine before it is allowed through. Others that I know have bene using it and it has held up perfectly for months. So the DNA is that the machines are kept out – if a real person wants to reach you it takes only 20 seconds to work through the gate and then you are in. here is a linkhttp://www.knowspam.net/

  7. Nancy McGough says:
    October 16, 2003 at 05:21

    As Nat Irons says above, this already exists and is usually called either “subaddressing”, “plus addressing”, “user-extension addressing”, or “detailed addressing”. It’s pretty common for IMAP service providers to offer this and I discuss it in this section of my IMAP page:http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap/isps/#subaddressingAnother thing that is similar but allows more control is to use shared IMAP mailboxes and only allow certain people to put messages in certain mailboxes.

  8. rsbell@mindspring.com says:
    October 25, 2003 at 06:52

    Dave,It wasn’t particularly well publicized, but Yahoo just released a new service called AddressGuard, which lets you create disposable email addresses for use whenever you don’t want to give out your real Yahoo! mail address.Messages sent to any disposable email addresses are automatically forwarded to your Yahoo! Mail account, and you can decide to direct these messages to a specific folder or delete them.One handy use of these feature: You can create a disposable email address which contains the name of any site one which you provide your address–say, amazon.davepollard@yahoo.com. Then you’ll always know where spammers picked up your email address.

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