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Email kaputt

In the last weeks email has become extremely unreliable for me. Only my free mail accounts (Gmail, Yahoo and GMX) seem to work fine. The virus filters of mail servers that come with my web hosting packages seem to collapse under the weight of spam and infected mail. One of my web hosting service providers told me that he is considering turning all virus filters off and charging extra for powerful mail servers that can cope with the amount of infected mail.

I think it is time that email grows up: Mail clients (and/or servers) should offer the option to only accept mails that are signed with a valid certificate. When the filter is turned on, mails which are not signed, should get bounced with a message stating that the recipient only accepts properly signed messages along with a link to instructions on how to obtain a certificate. For all mails that are properly signed but the sender can’t be found in the address book, the recipient should be prompted if he/she wishes to add the sender to address book.

I bet that very quickly people would start signing (and eventually encrypting) their mails. Ironically the amount of spam and viruses could be a catalyst to finally establish signing and encrypting as a standard.

Does this feature exist already? Has nobody ever thought of it? Is there a catch? Newsletters! They would not work anymore, would they?

Generally I think that news feeds should replace newsletters in most cases. In all other cases newsletter subscription forms would have to offer a public key upload.

What about emails to a bunch of people (e.g. everybody in a project team, birthday invitation etc.)?

Mail clients would need to automatically generate individually signed mails to all recipients. For convenience reasons it should be enough to type the pass phrase once in such a case.

Implement this in Outlook and have it activated by default and viruses should have a much harder time reproducing. In step two I would go as far as not offering the option to turn of this filter.