Partying with Spam
It's Saturday night, Rob is "out and about" in downtown New York. He's off to the IPO party of his best pal, Pauls tech venture. He gets to the door...
Doorman : "Name please"
Rob : "Rob"
Doorman : "Nope, we don't have a Rob"
Rob : "But Paul's my best pal. My name must be in there somewhere!"
Doorman : "Look, we have a Rod, but no Rob. Stand to the side please"
Rob : "Can you go find Paul and tell him i'm here?"
Doorman : "Sorry, we don't know where to find him and we can't really talk to him anyway"
Rob : "Right, I'll wait here until ...."
Doorman : "Yes you will, little man" (growls)
Now, as much as my books with Wrox brought me into the world of book writing (almost 7 years ago to the day), i'm not really interested in writing fictional stories, however, this story highlights something i ran into this morning.
As was blogged yesterday, I now operate a whitelist. My "Invitation" component for VentureTogether was working fine until then, but then I realized something and i'm interested in your opinons on it.
You can't really build a successful invitations engine when the email you send from will not be on the whitelist and so it will be blocked. Even if the person sending the invitation is the BEST friend you have ever had (you even buy each other cute little stuff on Saint's days and their kids call you "dad"). Whatmore, many mail servers (or at least their configuration) prevent you from setting the "sent from" field in the email to anything other than the domain you are sending from (to prevent spam i guess!). So you can't even impersonate the person (which is probably a good thing all round).
So what now? Well, I'd like to see "Spam Engines" get smarter - unless someone knows if something like the following exists. I'd like to have the ability to provide some evidence with an email (or maybe it would have to be via some web interface) that can be passed to Outlook Spam Blocker (for want of a better name) and that can be read and if is passes a certain level of trust, your email can get through. Ideally everyone would sign their emails, so why not just push your dig sig in there? Maybe. But even simpler would allow you at the email end to specify what you regard as a trusted level. This might be your full name, your postcode or some ID number. Heck a set of rules like the Rules engine. Maybe at the most obvious level, their email must be in the CC list or something.
So the conversation may end...
Rob : "...hang on, I have this invitation with his signature and I have my passport with my name on it to."
Doorman : "Ah, cool. This looks good my friend. My mistake, on you go." (best friend ever tone)
Doorman : "Rob - what's with those shoes?"
Otherwise right now the person doing the inviting will have to email his friend to tell him to expect the invitation which is just stupid (especially if you imagined the snail mail equivalent)!
vtgo.net