Channels: Avoiding unwanted electronic mail
Robert J. Hall
AT&T Labs Research
600 Mountain Ave
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
hall@research.att.com
The full paper is available here
Abstract
Receiving unwanted communications ranges from mere nuisance (junk mail)
through annoyance (telemarketing) to actually endangering the usefulness
of the medium (junk fax, obscene or harassing telephone calls).
The usefulness of electronic mail is seriously threatened by the exploding
commercialization of the Internet, because it is easy to collect and
maintain address lists and cheap to mass-distribute messages.
This paper describes a novel mechanism, electronic mail channels, that
enables users to control who can send them messages, allowing preferential
levels of access.
The key idea is to give each user the capability of having arbitrarily many
structured user names, each of which contains encoded within it
a cryptographically unguessable pseudorandom security string. This paper
also describes the implementation of a personal channel agent
that makes channelized email as easy to use as ordinary email
and facilitates administration operations, such as secure remote channel
switching.