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October 13, 2003

Pollard on saving email

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Posted by Clay Shirky

Dave Pollard takes on saving email with an idea for transient subdomains, essentially a formalization of the "migrate to a new email address when your old one becomes useless" process (and an analog to the biological defense of changing the surface of a cell, so that viruses that bind to the old shape can't bind to the new one.
What do we do now when we get too much spam in a mailbox? We trash it and set up a new one. It's a one-step-ahead-of-the-enemy approach, but it's extravagent. Suppose instead of just assigning people an e-mail address, we assigned them an e-mail domain, with the ability to set up an infinite number of subdomains (or channels, if you prefer), each with a short and finite life. Example: Let's say my e-mail address is dave.pollard@hotmail.com (it isn't -- I use my real e-mail address sparingly in public because of spam etc.) Instead of junking this address when the spammers overwhelm it, suppose instead I had an e-mail domain: dave.pollard@hotmail.com/ and could create any subdomains I want, and abandon them when they've lost their value.

Comments (1) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: social software


COMMENTS

1. Joseph Reagle on October 13, 2003 10:28 PM writes...

That's what I'm doing in [1], though I'm not using a subdomain, nor do I understand his approach of adding the subdomain *after* the domain (e.g., ".com"). Isn't easier to create addresses?


[1] http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/technology/email-approach

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