Dmail: Alternative to Email Promises to End Spam   - 2,749 Views, 4 Comments

Remember before everybody had email, and people logged in to private bulletin board systems (”BBS”)?

If you long for the days when internal correspondence at the office was hand-delivered in those yellow 8×11 envelopes with 172 names scratched out and yours written in at the bottom like the next recipient of some inter-office chain letter, have I got a deal for you.

Called “dmail”, and developed by Peter Jackson of England and promoted by one Mike Hardware (yes, really) of the British PR firm Chelgate, dmail is being tauted as “digital mail which does not interact with email”.

In fact, it pretty much doesn’t interact with anything at all, except itself. The dmail slogan is “A world of your own”, and that’s just what it gives you - an online mail world where nobody but other registered users of the system can contact you. It is an email system wrapped in a firewall shrouded in concertina wire.

Come to think of it, it sounds like the public email system which the Chinese government would have developed, if only they’d thought of it.

The idea is that if nobody can contact you from the outside, then the spam can’t get to you either.

So how, you may ask, is this different from any number of online interactive fora where users can contact each other? Hard to say, although the dmail website does promise “unbelievable capacity for storage and the rapid exchange of music, video, images and documents.”

There is also no hint as to what is to stop a dmail subscriber from spamming their fellow dmail subscribers six ways to Sunday.

On the other hand, Jackson clearly has a good sense of humour. His list of things which are good about dmail includes, among the more expected pluses: “No searching or scanning of message content” and “NOT a Microsoft company” (emphasis theirs).

Nutty? Perhaps, but it’s certainly possible to imagine corporate (and not so corporate) cultures which would find the prospect of an email system the access to which they can control completely very appealing.

The developers allow that “it’s intended for niche markets”, but point out that a next release of a nasty virus could cause users to come flocking to dmail.

Or perhaps their living in a world of their own.

In which case they can always give China a call.

Kissy kissy,

Aunty