Matt Haughy is doing his part to kill email (as it is currently understood). I am becoming increasingly convinced that email as we know it is going away. I’m beginning to think that the best solution would be signing all of our email with a certificate that comes from a reliable authority (your company for professional email and a third party for personal), and then relegating everything that’s not signed to a “suspected spam” folder. First class email will be for people who want to confess their identity. As far as white lists go, the odds of my responding to a challenge from a white list system approach zero.

Update: John Levine explains what’s bad about whitelist (challenge/response) spam prevention here. Also, for what it’s worth, I really don’t want to pick on Matt. Every time I read about someone signing up for these systems is another harbinger of total defeat.