[cowtools]

signup confirm emails are not what i'm describing, because you need to establish and filter the initial offer that they send you via email itself, which is still prone to phishing.

What I'm describing is a situation where users themselves have to proactively subscribe to a connection using some sort of out-of-band mechanism. For example, if a website wanted to send you emails, they could produce some sort of "connection ticket" that you can give to your email client in order to subscribe to them.

[michaelmrose]

This is useless because users are stupid, people sending the mail are stupid, people getting the mail are stupid, UI people creating interfaces are so stupid society could be improved by putting them in a box and mailing them all to some wasteland and hoping they form their own society there or starve.

This would result in half the planet being frustrated all the time and the other half never getting their mail.

If your goal is to secretly destroy email this is the way.

[franga2000]

This makes sense for service emails and is similar to how push notification services like Pushbullet work, but can't work for humans. You need to be able to give your email to someone IRL so they can send you a message. Mutual approval would be possible in the "we just met and want to exchange emails" situation, but that too breaks when you legitimately want to give anyone the chance to message you.

[iggldiggl]

> but that too breaks when you legitimately want to give anyone the chance to message you.

Yup. I do want people to be able to contact me regarding my homepage. It's only a niche page on a niche subject, so only a handful of people has written in, but it was nice hearing from them and some of them did make quite a few valuable contributions.

Some minimal obfuscation seems to be enough to keep mail harvesters away, and beyond that those mails go through the same spam filter as all my other mail traffic. Putting up a contact form would definitively be more of a hassle than just a simple mailto:-link, and then I would additionally have to start worrying about how to keep the bots away from that contact form.

[pas]

I know, but anything out of band won't really work, because that can be phished even more, plus as described above, there's no real need for it either (IMHO).