Facebook and Yahoo engineers have drawn up a new email standard that promises to address concerns over the release of inactive email accounts by some cloud email providers.
Put together by engineers from Facebook and Yahoo, the new standard is called Require-Recipient-Valid-Since, and functions as an extension to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) that is used to send all email messages.
The new system is relatively simple and entails adding a new field to the header of sensitive email messages to include the date since the sender has known the recipient's address. Using this data, an email provider can hence check if the receiving account has changed owners since the specified date, and block the message from being delivered if necessary.
The standard is already implemented by both Facebook and Yahoo, and has been published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a proposed standard (RFC 7293) for adoption by others.
While the standard will obviously have to be widely adopted by cloud email providers in order to be useful, the solution is an elegant one and represents a noteworthy improvement to email in general.
On the surface, marketers can easily capture the dates when users sign-up for their mailing lists or services, and transmit that when sending out marketing emails. This would help ensure that the correct recipient gets the email, and not to irate users who may then mark the messages as spam. Beyond that, it can be used as a way to prevent password resets that are tied to a recycled email account from ending up in the wrong hands.
Despite the growing pull of the various social media platforms, the humble email continues to be widely used for both work and play.
Indeed, a recent study by Forrester Research in which 30,000 adults were polled in the United States found that consumer attitudes towards email had become increasingly positive as a whole over the last four years.