I
really need to clear out my junk mail.
I'm constantly amazed at the ability of Google's spam filter to shield me from the incessant barrage of "BE&A*&B!!GGER M@N!!", normally by some descendant of Nigerian royalty.
The success of any new medium can be measured by the rapidity with which it attracts charlatans; The postal system had mail fraud, the telephone attracted con-men, television created late-night TV shopping, and email has brought spam to the world. These are all variations on a similar mindset, with only slight variations in scale and methodology.
There have been attempts to fix the inherently broken messaging system that is email, however it was created at a naive time by a naive community. Filtering provides a certain level of relief, but there always exists the risk of a false positive or negative. Other suggestions require a complete replacement of existing infrastructure - far too expensive, if you ask me.
Spam owes it success to the success of email itself; a medium in which there is zero cost to send a message to any other person. There is no weighting or priority associated with the messages; they are all treated equally, with no higher level notion of "trust" or "friendship" built into the system. Conversely, a posted letter from a close friend will almost certainly be opened and accepted at face value, but a generic mailer to "The Householder" is likely to be treated with caution.
There are a number of proposed solutions that incorporate some level of trust, however they all leave the underlying messaging system intact. I personally don't believe that email can exist without spam, and thus both must be abandoned.
I think we need to look to a different mode of communication for a solution. Blogs are currently being used to hold public conversations, so why not extend this further? Why can't my blog hold a private conversation with your blog? We could invite other blogs if we wished, and there would be a significant barrier to entry to prevent insincere participants.
Chat rooms are also an excellent forum for trusted communication; participants can be removed if their motives are not genuine, and irrelevant material is usually ignored.
Instant messaging, as an extension of the chat room, is also an excellent option. Unfortunately the lack of a broadly adopted instant messaging standard has segregated the community into silos (MSN users cannot talk to Yahoo users, etc.), limiting it's usefulness. The "Jabber" standard allows such interaction and is a step in the right direction, but it will take most of the major players to make it a success (it is already in use by Google Talk).
Another possibility arises out of the current success of RSS feeds - a simple system for bookmarking and receiving regular updates to your favourite Internet content. What if you simply checked my RSS feed regularly for messages to you? Or, perhaps, what if I published a separate feed for everyone I wish to keep in contact with? This reverse the current email system from "push" to "pull", where the user now actively seeks the messages they want. Ten years ago I subscribed to a whole host of email newsletters, however these days I simply subscribe to their RSS feeds. I receive updates when *I* want them, and I only receive content that I actively seek. The same principle could be applied to personal messaging; you would only receive messages from people you actively wish to contact.
These are just a few ideas, obviously with their own set of problems. I hope it at least provides some food for thought.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have 1008 messages to sort through.
