Can e-mail be saved?

Battered by junk and reeling under makeshift fixes, e-mail is ripe for reinvention. Here's how six of the industry's most provocative thinkers envision a brighter day

Allman's dream solution includes an Internetwide standard domain-authentication mechanism. "This would be part of an optional standard connection initiation protocol," he says, "so we wouldn't have to reinvent authentication for each and every use."

Over the past two decades, Allman's views on privacy haven't changed. He still believes it's a necessity, but he's developed a more sophisticated view of how to implement it. "I used to feel anonymity in the base protocol was important," he says. "But if someone brought up an anonymity server that would do re-mailings for you, that would allow this. The trick, of course, is to avoid abuse -- this could perhaps be done by having explicitly tagged addresses that are willing to receive anonymous mail. Whistle-blower addresses, investigative reporters, and so on might be willing to receive arbitrary anonymous messages," using servers that don't keep any logs that could be subpoenaed.

Allman thinks that problems with e-mail today extend beyond unsolicited ads. "There are lots of definitions of garbage," he says. "Spam is just the worst one. I know several people who've just given up on e-mail. They've gone back to having 'their person' do it. It's not just spam, it's also the continuous, 'Gee, can you help me on this?' No matter how big a shovel you have, you can't get rid of it."

From: Bill Warner

Subject: Identify Yourself

"Saying I like challenge-response systems is like saying I like duct tape," says Bill Warner, whose frustration with endless rounds of phone tag led to his development of the Wildfire voice system in the 1990s. Warner runs his own challenge-response server to kill incoming spam but would rather see the system redesigned more along the lines of the U.S. Postal Service -- not meaning the government would run it, but that there would be some people-centric checks on identity and abuse.

"It comes back to authentication," Warner says. "If you want to put a server on the system and use DNS, you've got to find your way into DNS somehow. We've managed to build a network of millions of servers around the world with a fairly open and clear process of registering for it. Why can't we do that with e-mail?"

Warner isn't talking about validating sender IP addresses, but instead having some idea of who's behind them. "Part of the problem is e-mail creates a large scale of anonymity. The postal service doesn't have that problem. You can send e-mail through the postal service, and it doesn't get more than a postmark. But you don't get to drop a million messages in the system. If you're a big mailer, you're going to be known. If you deliver a million pieces of mail to the post office, they're going to know who's doing it," and they're legally obligated to deliver them all.

In short, Warner thinks that instead of focusing on caller ID schemes that identify servers, we should reach past the computer to identify the person sending the message. "In a society founded on openness and transparency, one of the fundamental tenets is that people can be identified. A person is allowed to go out in public wearing a mask. But no one will give them a job, and no one's going to buy anything from them in a store. You're not going to let them through the front door of your business." Same with e-mail. "You still have ways to be anonymous. But someone who wants to get in the door and do business with you will have to take the mask off."

From: Eric HAHN

Subject: XML for E-mail