One of my duties at Epostmarks is to evangelize about our service and describe how rosy the future will look when the U.S. Postal Service participates to protect email. A question I’ve been asked—albeit infrequently—surrounds the need for such a service. I’ve written this essay as a response to these questions. I believe that despite its history, current significance, and future promise, the current state of affairs threatens email’s integrity, reliability, and efficacy. Furthermore, I believe the best way to combat this regression is through a public-private partnership with national postal operators (in particular the U.S. Postal Service).

What’s the Problem?

Email has established itself as the most successful application on the Internet. Adopted even more than web portals and search nearly everybody on the Internet uses email. Its ubiquity verifies its popularity and you can find email everywhere. Email’s uses go far beyond sending letters back and forth, I have seen email used as a verification of identity, as a file storage medium, as a notification mechanism.

So why among all these robust features and uses does email face issues large enough to endanger its very existence? When you intersect: 1) email was designed as an academic tool, without serious consideration to what it might evolve into; with, 2) the most unsophisticated among us use email, you get a huge opportunity for fraud and criminal activity.

Far from the conspiracy theorists reality, big brother is not watching. This means they aren’t watching what you do and they aren’t watching what criminals do to you so most get away scot free. Today, the estimated annual cost of spam and phishing exceeds $113 billion in direct monetary and non-monetary losses combined. This recurring cost to the US economy is nothing short of astounding and continues to grow.

How do we fix it?

I propose that the best way to reduce unwanted email fast is to create a closed loop, trusted system. One element that enhances the trust of a system from beginning to end is to know the identity of senders. Once you know who the senders are, reducing bad behavior becomes orders of magnitude easier.

Once the identity of a sender is known to a trusted authority (i.e. the Post Office) then the senders can associate that identity with any messages they send. In the vision we’ve developed at Epostmarks, a sender’s identity would get associated through the use of a cryptographic token affixed to each message sent. That means that every message has its own unique identifier associated with the sender’s credentials.

You might ask “What about privacy?” When asking the question, keep in mind the difference between privacy and anonymity. There is a natural tradeoff between anonymity and accountability but that should not contravene privacy. There is no reason for a reduction in privacy just because legitimate senders are being held accountable for their actions.

I have found when discussing the future with many, their internal pessimist moves up to the front of their personality and does all the talking. Expectations get set too high for what is necessary and perfection becomes the goal instead of something actually achievable. When discussing a solution involving the postal service I believe the goal should be to create a system that provides as much trust or more trust than the mail does today. I will add that this is no easy feat; the U.S. Postal Service is the most trusted government agency and has been for years running. The concepts discussed here achieve that goal though. We will have a system where anyone can choose to participate, fraud is virtually eliminated and business can flourish.

In the next few articles I will elaborate on the costs to consumers and businesses due to lack of trust in the current email system.