On Dec 1, 2010, at 7:25 AM, Marc Perkel wrote: > I've been thinking about what it would take to actually eliminate spam or > reduce it to less than 10% of what it is now. One of the problems is the SMTP > protocol itself. And a big problem with that is that mail servers talk to > each other using the same protocol as users use to talk to servers. > > Rather than get all users to change maybe it would be easier to get server > software to change. This transition can be done by making server software > that can do both protocols to maintain compatibility but will use the new > protocol if both sides are capable of talking at that level. > > I'm not sure what the specification of the new protocol should be but it > should at least be different than what email clients use so that server to > server communication isn't the same as client to server communication. > Perhaps server protocols can have more authentication information that would > protect them from being spoofed. But having something different - even if > it's just a port change - is better than what we have now. > > Thoughts?
You can already do this by requiring TLS and whitelisting specific keys, after doing out-of-band key exchanges. Only problem is, every server you want to exchange email with has to do it too.
