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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>This isn't how the internet is supposed to work.

The email architecture was started back when it was a smaller network of researchers at universities, governments, etc. Everybody basically trusted each other.

Once the "internet" is available to the general public and commercial interests, it becomes vulnerable to the "bad actors" problem (e.g. spam abuse). That's why we have the inevitable situation today of a few entities (e.g. gmail, hotmail) being "trusted", and random residential SMTP servers run by homeowners being "untrusted".

I haven't seen a realistic de-centralized trust proposal for email. Even if a proposal is theoretically sound, what incentive is there for other big players to adopt it?

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Combining a notify/pull system with a requirement for a valid domain certificate from a pre-approved list of CA's, similar to those already in the browsers, would go a step farther... increasing the costs for operating a a badly acting domain only to be blacklisted relatively quickly.

Unfortunately, that would be less than decentralized, but it may turn out to be the best option in combating spam.

I've just opted to pay for sendgrid for my small hobby BBS server's outbound email, because it's easier than setting up an appropriate outbound system myself, and as TFA points out, even then odds are you'll be bitbucketted before you even start.

How do you solve the problem of "cold call" with a trusting system ? How does one build up trust with a new account ? Spammers could create million accounts at once and fake trust build up between them. That's why I'm not convinced that trust will solve the abuse of messaging. A messaging application must allow "cold calls". Relying on trust built up by others is not a reliable system because it can be abused.

>How do you solve the problem of "cold call" with a trusting system ? [...] That's why I'm not convinced that trust will solve the abuse of messaging.

You can't remove "trust" or "reputation" from a viable messaging system. The concept of trust always exists whether informally or formally.

When the internet was a small private network between universities and government, how did a new unknown scientist "cold-call" an email? It was not an issue. The scientist just sent the cold email. There was already implicit trust within the system to allow that scenario. Everybody trusted that researcher@someuniversity.edu didn't send a million emails about Nigerian money transfers to researcher@army.mil.

Back then, email users didn't need "spam filters". The trust was informally created because the institutional "system" outside of the email system vetted email users. (The "system" being the hiring procedures of SomeUniversity, DepartmentOfDefense, etc.)

All those gates for reputation are gone when we expose that simplistic email architecture to the general public. Trust doesn't go away. You now must recreate trust at a massive scale.

>Spammers could create million accounts at once and fake trust build up between them.

That's not the type of "trust" people are talking about in this thread. That type of incestuous "trust" between bad actors won't work because it doesn't have an initial authority (good actor) to "bless" them which starts an acceptable "chain of trust". The concept is similar to Certificate Authorities. We trust Chrome because we trust Google Inc; and in turn, Google Inc trusts Verisign; and in turn, Verisign EV-certificate processing trusts government offices that register businesses.

Ok my assumption of trust credit working model was inaccurate. Could you give an example how trust could be used to control abuse ? If a user is given initial trust credit, how can one prevent spammers to create million of such "trusted" accounts and let them be banned after the hit and run spamming ? That model us used in messaging systems like Twitter but has its limitation. But is known to have its limit. Or did I still got it wrong ?

>, how can one prevent spammers to create million of such "trusted" accounts

Notice what you did there? You characterized spam accounts as "trusted" even though you didn't specify why or how they'd get trusted in the first place. There's still a gap in your thinking of how the origination of real (not fake) trust happens.

It's like a 1970s email user asking, "how does the system prevent a 'trusted' Nigerian money scammer from spamming everybody?" Well, why would Department of Defense hire a Nigerian scammer? Would a UniversityOfWhatever hire a Nigerian scammer? No. In that scenario, the trust begins with the institution. For the Nigerian scammer to be trusted, somebody authoritative has to "bless" him.

>Could you give an example how trust could be used to control abuse ?

Well, we're still using trust right now to help control abuse. Today, reputable corporations and also millions of honest users (that's us) "trust" Google Inc, Microsoft, Yahoo, FastMail, etc. Spam on a massive scale does not originate from gmail/hotmail/etc because those corporations shut them down.

The issue is that it's centralized trust concentrated in a few big players instead of de-centralized trust. That's the thorny problem that's very hard to solve. All the clever decentralized proposals (sender pays for storage, outbound payment bonds, cpu-proof-of-work, etc) are basically roundabout proxies for recreating "trust" on a bigger scale. I don't know what the final answer will be. I just know that trust/reputation is an unavoidable part of a new solution.

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