Scammers create thousands of email addresses and always find ways to get past spam filters. They send out millions of scam emails knowing that they’re likely to stumble upon a few vulnerable people they can scam for money.
They don’t care if they’re scamming elderly people with memory issues, adults with learning disabilities, somebody who can’t afford to heat their house in the winter.
I would love to take away their chess board.
I fully appreciate such a service would need to be international cooperation/ other countries would need to follow suit so we can receive emails from abroad.
– All current email services will still exist as usual and you can chose to carry on using them.
On the new system:
-Just like a home address, you get one personal email address per person. Your email address will include your name.
-you can receive emails from anybody else registered with the service, being assured that there is an identifiable human being behind that message
-businesses can also set up email addresses on this new regulated system, and have to go through a similar process of proving that they’re a legitimate business including photographic ID for individual staff emails (not visible to recipients of course, just for security), and can email personal users only with their consent
-businesses sending adverts legally have to tag their email as an advertisement prior to sending so it can be categorized correctly
-Users cannot have a company name in their email address unless they’re part of that company and it’s an official business email – to stop scammers pretending to be your bank.
-mandatory two-step log in process (12+ digit long password (which you only enter 3 digits of at a time in case someone is recording your keystrokes) + one of: finger print/face recognition/code sent to personal mobile device)
-Government cannot read your emails without a warrant from a judge which you will be made aware of – they are encrypted for everybody except the user (for those who are about to make comments about George Orwell).
Thoughts?
10 comments
1. Good luck enforcing that world wide. You can literally turn your home computer into a web server with its own email
2. If you could stuff like the panama papers, or snowdens mass surveillance or mannings war crime whistleblowing would have been much harder to get out… i guess these days could probably use some other encrypted message services
Good Luck with implementing that worldwide.
Who’s gonna verify all the identification details when you set this email up?
Youd have to have a massive office full of people working 24/7 going through every single application.
who’s gonna pay for it?
A very thorough post – I can’t address everything individually (time), but some top line points in no particular order –
The internet is essentially a big network of computers, operating on agreed-upon open-sourced protocols. You could turn your own personal computer into a web server, or an email server, or a pirate media hosting service, or provision a computer somewhere else on the network to do that.
Therefore, while you’ve addressed domain or address verification / ownership, there’s still nothing stoping someone making a rogue email server, and using it to send emails out spoofed as another address that they don’t own.
An analogy would be setting up a verification system with royal mail in order to send post out, but scammers getting around it by simply hand-delivering scam mail instead.
The internet is global – the nefarious activity tends to come from under-regulated places anyway. You’d not be able to get full global cooperation to make it work.
You’d just be make setting up an email a ballache, and be penalising normal people, and phishers would still be operating, so you wouldn’t solve the problem.
Edit – spelling
My standard gmail account is very good at sorting out the mail, as long as I don’t use the phone. I dont see spam on my phone. There are 1000s of spam phishing etc in the spam folder.
Rather than working around the existing issues with a new system, which will likely only get hacked in the long run, the current system should be fixed so that any spam emails can be flagged by recipients to a central point &, if enough reports are received, the source (not spoofed sender name) is identified & blocked completely.
It exists in Italy, and it has substituted all official letters and mail communications between public services and its users, and b2b mails in certain professions (law above all). You can’t send an email to a certified address without a certified address.
It costs a few quids per year.
Also, guaranteed email delivery (yes, emails DO GET LOST).
It would never take off. Why would I want to pay for an email that virtually no one could send a message to. Just learn how to whitelist and blacklist and teach people internet safety. As it is I hardly get spam these days – your just inventing a massively complicated system for no real good reason.
It’s a great ideal, but in reality people would not pay for it. What you have to realise is that the common person are fancy free they only fancy stuff that’s free.
Also I have had my email since 2002, it would be such a pain in the arse to change my email for everything I use.
How can emails be “enecrypted for everybody except the user” if they can be requested with a warrant? This doesn’t solve any Orwellian concerns.