Using Rss Instead Of Email

basilisk · Joined: Nov 05, 2003 Posts: 4

I have an idea for using RSS to replace email entirely and eliminate all spam. Trouble is that this idea seems so obvious that I can't understand why no-one has done it.
For obvious reasons I don't want to spell out my idea at this point but someone else must have thought about using RSS for email haven't they?

michaelkuznet · Joined: Dec 28, 2002 Posts: 51

A quick search would have shown you that this has been brought up by no other than yours truly: http://help.lockergnome.com/index.php?showtopic=9897
Further more, I encourage you to always spell out your ideas- I'm just a teenager, but even I have figured out that while most of the ideas I come up with are crap, when I share them with others they can merge with other ideas and become refined into a wonderful thing. That is what the internet is all about- sharing your ideas.
MK

basilisk · Joined: Nov 05, 2003 Posts: 4

Hi MK - well my reluctance is that it seems such a commercial idea that I'd like to exploit it but as I don't have access to vast commercial resources lets talk about it. A simple experiment shows you can post items to a web page using Blogger or some similar program in RSS format and then set you news aggregator to check the page. I've set up pages for a myself and family and it works. The next stage would be to adopt either an email prog or a news aggregator to do the conversion to/from RSS and the user wouldn't even know it was any different. Then email doesn't get pushed to you it gets pulled from web sites. All that remains to do is to work out the security details and how to promote the idea so it catches on. If you had the cash to do it you could set up secure servers to host the pages and all you need is a zillion dollars to advertise your 100% spam free email service.
I've worked out the technical details in a bit more detail if anyone wants to collaborate.

michaelkuznet · Joined: Dec 28, 2002 Posts: 51

I understand where you are coming from with the protecting ideas, but allow me to expand briefly, and then let us focus on more important things. I find nowadays, the trend becomes profit depends not whether or not you had a good idea, but whether or not you put enough time into it to make it work well. Because software relatively "easy" to create nowadays, there is plenty of competition, making the first-idea advantage moot. This is evident by the fact that while RSS is a common idea that everybody knows how to make, there are tons of great aggregators by small, private programmers which have become popular strictly by word-of-mouth. It no longer takes a giant like IBM to make technology work.
Enough on that though.
You seem to be bent on the more commercial aspect of this problem. However, lets make sure we know exactly how this is going to work before we get caught up in the blinding lights of money. Here are my main concerns:
Spam.
The way I was looking at making this spam free was by whitelisting certain addresses. Similarly, easily modifiable filters that could check my email for words of my choosing could pick out the emails I simply NEED to have NOW. This part is already available through most email clients, and it could be as easy as sending all of these emails to a seperate folder. Then those would be routed to the RSS feed.
The rest of the email, that isn't whitelisted or filtered into the feed, would be left among the spam. And yes, the user would have to sit and sort it.
The way I see it, if it is not important enough for you to make a seperate filter for it, it is unimportant enough to be put in with your spam, and if you need it you can go find it.
This is all I have come up with so far. Any suggestions?
MK

basilisk · Joined: Nov 05, 2003 Posts: 4

The idea is more radical than the way you are thinking about it.
I propose that the solution is to forget email as a communication medium. The only thing that is allowed in the setup I am thinking is posting messages to secure websites in RSS format. If I want to communicate with you I put the text directly on to a webpage - let's say it's www.basilisktalkstoMK.com. Now you set your news reader to check this page at regular intervals and see if there are any new RSS entries. If there are you pick them up as RSS feeds. Everyone else you want to communicate with also puts their message on webpages and you simply poll the pages of everyone you want to speak to (effectively your white list). If you are web-savvy this is easy to do and, as I said, I've already tested this out and proved it will work.

Unfortunately the average user will not want to mess about with webfeeds and RSS. It should be relatively simple to modify an email program so that instead of routing to the recipient across the web it wraps the message in RSS and publishes to the appropriate webpage. Similarly instead of the email prog contacting your ISP it visits the webpages of all your contacts.

Sending an email becomes publishing to a webpage and reading email becomes collecting content from a bunch of other pages.

Problems:
There will be people you don't know who want to contact you legitimately. They would have to be routed to a holding webpage which you would review from time to time and add their pages to your poll list if they looked OK.
Attachments - should be simple enough by adding some kind of ftp functionality to the webpages you poll. If the RSS message contains a keyword "attachment" then your reader could also pick up the attachment. (though this would be a potential security risk and would need thinking through).

michaelkuznet · Joined: Dec 28, 2002 Posts: 51

Ahh yes, the forum idea. I had mentioned that in my previous post also, which I highly recommend that you read so that we can be on the same page. (I linked to it in my first response to this topic)
You brought up the main problem with this approach- it is impossible for people that do not know you to send you a message- if you make a special "folder" on the webpage just for unknown people, then by the end of the week a spammer will have figured out how to use it to his or her advantage, and if you just give up on other people contacting you at that address, you will find that you might as well just have a private email address that you give only to your very close family and threaten their lives (or inheritance, depending on your family situation) if they ever disclose it to anyone.
Here is another problem to keep in mind, with a relatively simple solution. Lets say that I am going to Sally's to buy a CD she is selling. I email her, "Sally, how much is that CD?" she replies $5. So I walk over to her place, but by the time I get there, she has gone onto her website and edited it to make it look like $8! Although the difference may not seem extreme here, the point is that when Sally sends me a message, I have nothing on a server that belongs to me showing that Sally sent this; UNLESS I have a way to make sure that all RSS information coming in is not in any way updated by her feed. Its a simple archiving thing, which many aggregators do, but its something that should not be overlooked for vulnerabilities.
Tell me what you think.
MK

61Dynamic · Joined: Dec 12, 2002 Posts: 484

I don't see this idea going anywere.

In addition to unknown people not being able to contact you, what about old messages you haven't recieved yet? Most RSS feeds today only carry about 15 posts. Will that amount be increased in your idea and by how much? Should each feed be indefinte in size or shoud they be saved as archived feeds? I don't want to loose half my messages becasue I forgot/wasn't able to check my messages every day.

If it's indefinate, then thats a lot of wasted bandwidth downloading the file each time. It would have to have archived feeds. Mabye something like one feed for each week and software on the users end will remember how long ago the page was last checked and thusly download appropriatly.

Basically it sounds like a complicated way of doing what we have now but with all the limitations of RSS.

Who the hell wants that?

michaelkuznet · Joined: Dec 28, 2002 Posts: 51

You answered your own question- archived feeds are the way to go and there are several aggregators that already allow you to do this. Because the feed would have to be individually authenticated, rather than just having hundreds of 'anonymous' hits, the webserver could be aware of the last time your computer logged in. This way, the user would not have to depend on a specific piece of software- but could freely change aggregators and just subscribe.
Sure it might seem like we're not going anywhere, but I've got unused cycles running around in my head causing mischief, and I've had most of today off of school and all of tomorrow, so lemme dream, k?

Very Happy

MK

basilisk · Joined: Nov 05, 2003 Posts: 4

61Dynamic is right in saying it "sounds like a complicated way of doing what we have now but with all the limitations of RSS." I never said it wasn't complicated and I'm not claiming all the details have been worked out. Sure you need a reliable archiving system for your RSS feeds, you need authentication, you need lots of other things working out.
However, what matters is the user experience. It would be entirely possible to hide the complications so that the user need not even be aware what's happening behind the scenes. As far as a user is concerned it could be engineered to look as if they were just using email in the regular way.
Right now any idiot in the world can be spam me and I have to waste loads of my time in using filtering software to screen it out. That's my motivation in floating this idea - is it viable as an anti-spam method? I think it could be.
The latest idea being exploited is the "challenge and response" method of dealing with emails. This is every bit as complicated, if not more so. The main idea is OK but then you have to add in all the exceptions of legitimate emails being incorrectly challenged and all the extra traffic that may entail and so on. I suspect it has the potential to make things worse rather than better in the long run.
I'm not ready to let go of the idea just yet.

NoahKristoffer · Joined: Aug 27, 2003 Posts: 264

basilisk said:
I'm not ready to let go of the idea just yet.

********

Maybe you should!!!

michaelkuznet · Joined: Dec 28, 2002 Posts: 51

Noah for chrissake dont post stuff like that- unless you're going to explain why you feel the way you do, nobody wants to hear it because it doesn't add anything- this is a topic, not a poll.
MK

NoahKristoffer · Joined: Aug 27, 2003 Posts: 264

michaelkuznet · Joined: Dec 28, 2002 Posts: 51

Okay lets both agree to not have an argument about this- I was just frustrated to hear what seemed to be a random statement without any support. However, you obviously can do whatever you want. Was there a reason why you thought basilisk should drop his idea?
MK

MadJo · Joined: Dec 17, 2002 Posts: 5

it is a nice idea. However I'm a bit iffy about putting personal 'e-mails' out in the open. Besides that, you would need a feed for every person you ever 'emailed', in the end it could become a webspace-hog let alone the bandwith it uses.

ploesch · Joined: Aug 22, 2003 Posts: 4060

I have to say I'm with MadJo on this.

I love RSS, and I use NewsGator, so I have alot of the functionality that you are talking about (NewGator only pulls new posts, works in outlook so can take advantage of rules and all other outlook functions, can post to blogs, etc.).

RSS standards require that only 15 posts can be showed at a time. OK, we could change this by making a new standard, RSM (Really Simple Mail).

You are still left with the fact that everyperson would have to have their own webpage, a separate one for each Mail account they wanted to use, and this would not work well in a corporate environment. Also since the mail would live on the web a cracker could access all your personal e-mails by cracking the site DB. Not much different than it is now, but it is alot harder to crack a mail server than a website DB Server.

This would not stop you from receiving Spam, it would just change the way you deal with it.

The other option is for you to create an outgoing channel to each person that you want to contact, but this would not work for contacting someone that you've never contacted before.

If I'm missing something here let me know, but I think this is just a more complicated way of doing what we already have now. I know that SPAM is an issue, but I don't see this as eliminating Spam, it really would just change the method of sending Spam.

RSS is only Spam proof as long as it remains a Pull Technology. As soon as you add the ability to add a push end to RSS then it becomes SPAM bait.

I subscribe to the feeds for the Forum topics, Because the forums are open for anyone to post (push to me!), if someone was to Spam this Board, I would then be receiving Spam. If it was allowed to continue, or the Spammer had an automated way of creating accounts and continued to spam under different names and subjects, I would then need to set-up filters and have software to get rid of the Spam. Back in the same boat.

The only way you could make this truly work is to set-up a separate feed for each person you mail to on your site, and only allow that person to download the feed, only allow yourself to post to it. This obviously this CAN'T WORK not only would this become unmanageable quickly, you would have no way of contacting people that you didn't know. If someone gave you their card, You could not e-mail them until you contacted them with their username and password to your site so they could check for mail!

I don't think that RSS can solve the Spam problem, but it can reduce it by limiting the # of places your e-mail can be seen on the web.

I think the best way eliminate spam has already been mentioned in this Forum.

It would work something like this:
That is an automated opt-in process for mailing an individual person. You mail someone (anyone), then their e-mail server, or client software adds you to a hold list, and mails you a confirmation (maybe even containing a graphic key to unlock mail so an automated response can't be used ALA PayPal). If you respond to the Confirmation (with key in corect field?) then the mail is allowed to go through, otherwise it is held for several days, then deleted, the user never sees it. On the User end they could have a refuse list, so if a spammer goes through all the trouble of opting in (not worth their time if it can't be automated, that's why the graphic key is important), the end user can still refuse all future mail from them.

On top of everything else, the Spammers would no longer be able to spoof e-mail addresses to fool filters, they would have to use a legitimate e-mail address because of the opt-in. So you could have two categories of blacklist, refuse, and Spam. Then the software could report Spam mail to a site, along with a verified e-mail address. If too many people report an e-mail address as sending Spam that e-mail address could be tracke to the offending person, and they could be dealt with harshly. You would also have a whitelist that those who opt-in would be added to. The program should automatically add yoor address book(s) to the whitelist, and have a way to manually add addresses to the whitelist.

Make it work inside of outlook and Outlook express for the greatest returns, I love my outlook, and would be hard pressed to give it up.

Even if a spammer say spoofed "windowsdaily@lockergnome.com" or whatever, the % of return they would get for their effort would be minimal or non-existant, and so the effort would be wasted. Spammers are in it for the money, and the more effort they have to make for dwindling returns the sooner they will go away! Down with spammers!

I offer these ideas freely, I don't have enough programming talent to make the program. If you can make the program, I just ask that you give me a free copy with lifetime updates. Smile