Bill Kearney

How to get better addresses in feeds?

There's one aspect of RSS that confounds me. How to get in contact with the authors of the feeds. That is, without leaping through flaming hoops and mindless web page comment forms. My perspective is a bit narrower than what the public might want. I'm looking to find a reliable way to have programmed code pick up on the addresses.

I think there's a way to do this but it might be a little work. My thought is to start making more use of things link Foaf in your RSS feeds.

Here's what I'm thinking:

Create a feed.
Create an sha1hash of an e-mail address you'd be willing to use for this purpose.
Put that hashed address in the feed.
Now use that same address to sign up with a trusted third party.
The third party could use your hash to provide it's trusted users with a way to reflect e-mail to you.

An alternative angle might be sort of the same but more secure.

Create a feed.
Get a PGP key
Put that PGP key in for your contact info
Sign up with a trusted third party and offer up that key and an e-mail address you'd be willing to use to receive mail.
Put that third party's public key on your PGP keyring.
Then configure your inbox to reject any and all mail that's not from addresses already on your keyring.
Optionally accept mail from senders only if their PGP key has been signed by someone else you already trust.

In this case it'd allow for some quite rigid control over what mail would ever get delivered to you. You'd be able to reject it out of hand if it lacked the right key signatures.

This is not trivial stuff, I'll grant you. But SPAM is out of control and there's no end of it's madness in sight. So instead of punishing each other by depriving ourselves of using e-mail let's escalate the arms race a bit. Let's move up to using trusted signatures. This way there will be more of a digital paper trail back to abusive senders. There's still room for hacks, of course, but with the ability to revoke and block messages based on keys you stand a much better chance than plain text e-mail alone.