A small addition to the IMAP/POP email protocols could significantly reduce spam if adopted. IMAP and POP are used to get email from email servers and download it to your computer. IMAP is far more advanced than POP in that it allows you to create server side folders and store email there. So IMAP can both download and upload email.
Since IMAP can upload email then why not let IMAP be the transport for sending email out from the client instead of using SMTP? The email user would be able to upload the outgoing email over the same connection that it receives incoming email. This eliminates the need for a separate connection and a separate setup for outgoing mail.
The way it would work is the IMAP server would receive the outgoing message and then hand it off to the outgoing SMTP server that would send it to the recipient’s email server. Mail would just go out over the existing connection rather than having to establish a different connection using a different setup and a different protocol. Advantages would include:
- Half the setup time. The incoming email setting would also be your outgoing email settings.
- Verification – outgoing email could be certified by the server that it came from a person who could read the email address that they were sending from. This would reduce email spoofing.
- Eventually SMTP protocol could be eliminated from consumers making SMTP a server to server protocol only.
One of the problems with detecting spam is that the SMTP protocol is the same whether you are an end user sending email or an email server sending email. Thus virus infected spam zombies look like consumers sending email and servers sending email. If SMTP were limited eventually to servers only then spambots would go away as ISPs closed port 25 to the public and forced end users to use outgoing IMAP or submission protocol on port 587. If computer viruses are isolated then they can’t spread and the virus problem will, for the most part, go away.
