Salesforce thinks it can fight spam with blockchain

You probably receive email marketing that was deployed on a Salesforce system multiple times a week, without even knowing it. Well, the cloud-based customer relationship management firm is now intent on using blockchain to curb the number of spam emails finding their way to inboxes.

The US Patent and Trademark office published a document yesterday that outlines Salesforce’s concept of using blockchain to ensure the authenticity of emails sent to customers.

Presumably, this system will only work for clients that currently use one of Salesforce’s customer relationship management products. However, this is not clarified in the patent.

The system appears to work by using a series of email servers to reach a form of consensus on what can be considered the true original email. When this is confirmed, it is recorded on a blockchain.

Secondary email servers then reference this blockchain-based record to ensure what they received – to deploy to inboxes – is correct and true to the original.

If the secondary servers confirm the email to be correct, it will be allowed to reach the recipients’ inbox. If not, the email goes straight to the spam folder.

Sounds neat, but it seems unclear if and how this system will prevent the spam and junk mail from those dodgy senders that got your email, from that time you forget to check the opt-out option, on that website you probably shouldn’t have signed up to…

Hard Fork has reached out to Salesforce seeking further clarification on how this blockchain-based spam filter will be implemented.

That is, assuming it will be implemented, right now we must remember it’s a patent filing, not a working concept.

It might not be far away though. In the last few months Microsoft stated it is working on using its Azure blockchain platform to stop spam telephone calls in India.