[Freedombox-discuss] Email on the FreedomBox Discussion

[Brandon Invergo]

On Wed, 2011-08-24 at 12:28 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Ah, you propose to not deal with oldworld spam, just leave that to ISPs.  
> Ok.
> 
> How then prevent spam in newworld?  Just assume that noone sends spam?
> 
> 
>  - Jonas

As I said, it was a largely naive suggestion, as I'm only recently
starting to learn about the inner workings of email. Nonetheless, I was
more referring to the problem of ISPs not allowing users to set up their
own SMTP servers and generally blacklisting email coming from such
sources. So I'm purely looking at an outgoing situation: how can I be
sure that my personal, non-spam messages arrive to their destination,
even if I'm sending them from my FBX?

As for the incoming problem, I don't have a good solution because,
you're right, content-based filtering systems are expensive on resources
and simply aren't as good as, for example, Google's spam filtering. I
suppose that within the FBX network, signing is important. If I get an
email from you and it's not signed, then I assume it's not legitimate
and I can discard it. For email from the outside world, though, I have
no idea. In the interim, one could at least take advantage of Google's
spam filtering, but have their FBX use fetchmail to pull the
(legitimate) email from GMail and hold onto it until you fetch it from
the box. It's not ideal, as your emails still go through Google's
filters for their ad service, but at least your emails aren't sitting on
their servers (ok, they are there in backups) and you get to take
advantage of excellent spam filtering.

Anyway, like I said, naive hand-waving....
-brandon