And so it begins…
I’ve already written a good portion of the middle-ware for the product post-pilot, but am now realising it’s a pretty big job for one person. Building servers and selecting appropriate EU IaaS providers, adhering to legislation and keeping technically relevant are only small parts of the roadmap.
In 2016 there was a lot of spam going about. At one point I was getting thousands of emails a week of which approximately half were to addresses I’d used explicitly to send SARs (subject access requests).
It wasn’t just appalling re-use of data, it was wanton flaunting of data protection and privacy laws for profit. Some of the attitudes were Facebook-level appreciate of data protection law – including one response to a standard ASA complaint which the ASA uncomfortable and gave a few of us a laugh:
Fortunately two things happened:
- I had acquired a lot of skills & some significant experience in technical fields over the years
- The more spam I received, the more data & meta-data I was accumulating on spammers
After a couple of years of trying direct action in the UK County Courts (with mixed success) I realised I could use the meta-data to build an email security product which I could then distribute on open-source. I started tinkering with Python and my usual email client, Gnome Evolution – as it allows you to easily create mail filters which call a script.
That evolved into a much wider capability that I’ve piloted on my own mailbox for the last two years or so. All seems to work reasonably well and efficiently. However after visiting a few of the stands at the InfoSec Europe 2019 trade show at Olympia, I realised there’s a lot of companies selling the same or similar platforms for a lot of money.
However none of them seemed to interact with spam email the way I was designing my product.
Which brings us to the subject of this blog – an email security product code-named “Ringo Dingo”, after asking for suggestions from everyone at home. Next time perhaps I’ll pick a random word from a dictionary.
So I needed a way of tracking the random thoughts crossing my brain about it, rather than forget something critical or unusual that would be good to add to the overall capability. I started using my usual kanban, Trello, to log ideas and triage the good stuff from the crap, and have progressed all workable options to Gitlab.com boards.
The pilot is pretty much done and dusted, so I started redesigning Ringo Dingo as middleware – which would enable the access from any mail client or MTA. What was missing was a book of progress on the overall piece… which is where this blog comes in.
My other blogs focuses on other topics relating to data protection whereas the this record is purely R&D.