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Single sender email addresses -- The idea is that a subscriber to the service gives out a separate email address to each friend or associate that he's willing to hear from (maybe from serialized business cards or whatever). The mail server accepts and records the first sender to any previously unused address, and subsequently performs a policy dependent action (e.g., blocking) when mail to that address is received from any other sender. Return addresses on outoging mail also have to be handled consistently. Not sure if there's a market but I know I'd use it myself.

Any non-obvious flaws?



That isn't bad. The only obvious flaws are running out of unique addresses or, if addresses are easily guessable, having spammers iterate over your free addresses inserting themselves as the "first sender."

A system where that person is added as the sender to the system BEFORE they send an email for the first time would solve this, however, this is equivalent to white-listing in current email solutions.


I do something like this manually in my personal life.

It works good for memberships or online shopping; you have something like [email protected], [email protected], etc.

In real life not so much: people know they're getting a "fake" email address (regardless of whatever scheme you pick) and get put off by this.


What if the friend you gave the card to has several email addresses? Or changes his address and tries to email you from the new one?


Bayesean filtering? If it's trained on a corpus of mail from the same person, it could be more effective than in the general case.


Until they forward you a mail.




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