another solution to spam

A friend left me a copy of a Wall Street Journal review about a new add-on program for your email client called Matador. It's a Windows-based program that works with Outlook 2000, and Outlook 2002. A version that works with Outlook Express is expected to be out shortly. There is a fee for the program, but it has a free one month trial period. It may be worth trying out if it lives up to the description in the review. It is available from a Palo Alto company called Mail-Frontier. Looks interesting.

[later... I also wanted to point out Doc Searls latest entry on filtering email. His post, The Yam Solution is about the use of personal digital certificates from trusted third parties. If an email has a digital certificate authenticating who the sender is, it gets past a filter. I don't know if we're quite ready for this, but we have to start somewhere.

This testimony (pdf) from Jonathan Zittrain before Congress a couple of years ago also touches upon what digital certificates might mean to the internet. There's a certain freedom of anonymity that I appreciate about the web. But, it comes with a lawlessness about it. Chances are good that the internet will become more regulated in the future rather than less. Some questions surrounding that involve who does the regulating, and how much of a role the public will have in making that decision.]