Replacing email protocols with blockchain-based smart contracts

Abstract

Email services nowadays are flooded by spam and phishing attacks. Email service providers build their own email filters to protect the final users from such attacks resulting in an overall better experience. However, the attacks come mainly from the same problem in the email protocols, i.e., the lack of authentication mechanism. In this work, we attempt to minimize some of the most common problems identified in email services such as spam, phishing, spoofing, lack of encryption, repudiation and centralization by implementing a smart contract over the Ethereum protocol. The proposal involves a decentralized system, a smart contract, a file system and two applications used as proof of concept.