Hacker News Reader

Comment by sean_pedersen | Hacker News Reader

OK after giving this idea a little bit more thought. This is the deal: PoW for eMail needs to come with a parameter that controls the amount of work (computation) done to find the PoW hash. This allows senders to choose on a continuous scale how important it is for them to proof they are not mass mailing spammers.

This in turn allows small organizations / private mail servers that are not on common anti-spam white lists to proof their good intentions in a decentralized fashion.

PoW makes mass mailing very expensive and thus directly hurts spammers that are not on the common anti-spam white lists. Organizations that need to mass mail users for legitimate reasons are most likely already on anti-spam white lists and thus need not to do a very hard PoW hash as they are already proven to not be spamming.

View on HN

This is probably the solution to getting something like this off the ground. If the minimum PoW is zero (so not participating) and a >0 PoW is seen as a positive flag in spam filters. However I guess that most Spammers don't even setup DKIM etc. or fail it. So whoever would implement the PoW to send legitimate emails is probably doing other stuff already that get their emails flagged as legitimate.

What do you mean by “common anti-spam white lists”? AFAIK there are none. There are common black lists. And the only whitelists are per-user, maybe per-org for work email.

Wait what? I thought major players like GMail, Microsoft etc. have some kinda "monopoly" on eMail because they are gatekeeping by using a strict white list.

It's the other way around. In general Gmail, Microsoft etc are whitelisted by other people because they are trusted to deal with spammers using their platforms. Whether they are actually more trustworthy is another matter.

There is no such monopoly - just look at your inbox, and check the headers of the emails you see. (I just did checked a random non-spam mailing, and it was send by cmail9.com - which is pretty suspicious domain if you ask me.. and yet here is it in my inbox)

Sending emails is hard because there is no central authority. Instead, each provider checks if the sender does some “best practices”. And the exact details vary - so if you got it working once with gmail, then there is no guarantee it will work next time with live.com. So you got to do them all.

For example, I have heard an unconfirmed rumor that one of the major provider started penalizing email sender machines without IPv6 address. If I had to maintain a mail sender, this’d mean have to upgrade my architecture to use IPv6 ASAP, which is non trivial at all. This is why most people outsource email sending.

I did not mean monopoly in the literal sense, just used it to express my feeling that a lot ends up flagged as spam that is not from these major corps servers.

This is just a feeling,

Do you know how to read email headers? Are you subscribed to mailing lists? If yes, go to your inbox and check a few messages for the sender. You would be surprised at how many senders are there.

For transactional emails / regular mailing lists, I estimate that you just need like 0.25 FTE working on email, maybe even less. While this is not something everyone can do, there are tens of thousands email senders out there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com