The reason this has popped up again after all this time is due to the fact that I am now getting hammered by spam from an old domain that I don’t use anymore. My own company name was recently redirected so I could police it. I’ve taken the bold measure of simply trashcanning anything that I don’t have an account for. My Anti-Spam firewall [MailFire, an offshoot service of the MailGuard protected service once found at MailAmi.com] protected my mail servers from even being publicly viewable by the spammer. MailFire detected spoofed headers, blocked IP’s, and allowed users to dynamically configure their account via the web. Add an authorized sender, authorize a user to send mail to them, and so on. It was a great service. It prevented 99.95% of all spam from getting through when used properly. It also prevented the majority of spam from being transmitted across the net.
Basically, standard practice is to receive all mail and parse it after receipt. MailFire did this within the first few bytes of the communication between sender and receiver. So a 12k spam message was reduced to about 64 bytes, and the spamming server never sends the unauthorized message. Best of all was that my real server was never touched, or even seen, by the spammer, so it couldn’t be hacked. Only my firewall could be hacked, and it was configured to block any unauthorized IP address.
I wish I had all that right now, I wouldn’t have to resort to trashcanning all mail except explicitly addressed mail. The other thing that killed the business model was that everyone expected the service to be free. They hated advertisements. And some expected it to be magic, automatically protecting a user from spam without any configuration. It did that when it was configured to be the most strict. The more I think about it, the more I write, the more I write, the more I want to restart that service.
Anyone know of a good coder who wants to be a partner? I might even be able to restart that patent.
[Edit] Interestingly, someone now has a similar application running at MailGuard.com, and MailFire.com has a service operating at that domain. Neither are affiliated with me, my former business, or the application that was patent pending. MailGuard.com is very close though. Pretty much spot on actually.