Summary |
SFM is a subscription-based E-mail server (acting
as a Mail Transport Agent) whose service consists in easy (mostly
automatic) generation of aliases personalized to different senders.
The way those aliases are personalized makes them immune to spamming,
while providing safe, reliable, and hassle-free points of contact
for human senders.
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Highlights |
Complete protection from spam
Open source
Transparent operation
Compatibility with most clients
High reliability of contacts
+ group contacts
+ e-commerce
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Project status |
SFM has been in operation since August
2003 and is used by the faculty and students of the CS
Department at the UofA.
The reference installation
at UofA CS is accessible (with some bandwidth restrictions) to
the public.
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SFM
is available under GPL from its SourceForge
project page.
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Prerequisites |
Linux (RedHat 9.0 or Fedora)
Tcl (8.4 or newer)
qmail (1.03 or newer)
GD Library (2.0.28 or newer)
Apache (2.0.x or newer)
BerkeleyDB (4.2 or newer)
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About |
SFM
eliminates spam by reversing the paradigm of electronic
mail, while retaining its traditional simplicity and convenience.
With the old paradigm, your E-mail address provides a global
point of contact, whereby anybody knowing it is allowed
to send you a message. The system is inherently open, which
means that there is no effective way to keep spam out of
your mailbox. With SFM, your contacts receive different
(personalized) E-mail addresses of yourself confined to
those contacts. This eliminates address harvesting by rendering
it futile.
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When
you subscribe to SFM, you set up one or more "advertised"
(official and global) E-mail address(es) of yourself that
can be used by anybody willing to contact you for the first
time. This is done in a way that renders the advertised
address unusable for harvesting and spamming. A human sender
of a message arriving at such an address will be (automatically)
assigned a personal address (alias) of yourself restricted
to that particular sender. If needed (in truly exceptional
circumstances), you will be able to revoke or modify your
aliases via a simple Web interface.
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There
are two reasons why an alias is immune to spam. First, it
isn't published but presented to a single contact (which
also can be a group of people). Second, it is restricted
to the specific contact (a narrow population of senders).
This is accomplished by associating with the alias the list
of authorized sender addresses, i.e., legitimate sources
of incoming E-mail The actual procedure is completely automatic
and goes as follows.
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After
an alias is created, it remains open for a predetermined
amount of time (typically 1 week). During that time, it
will accept messages from everybody adding their senders
to the list of its legitimate contacts. Then, when the open
time expires, the alias becomes closed. From this point
on, it will only accept E-mail from the senders on its contact
list.
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Copyright (C) P.G., 2004
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