The objective of the platform is to determine if the emails are authentic or if they were intercepted and altered during their shipment
The U. S. software company Salesforce won a patent to detect spam emails with blockchain technology. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published the document on its website, on Tuesday 4th.
Salesforce, which created a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) called Sales Cloud, wants blockchain technology to look if an e-mail is being sent legitimately or not, it means if the message was altered to filter spam.
It offers a cloud-based mailing system as a solution to detect if an initial e-mail was modified while being sent. When a user sends an e-mail, a portion of it would be registered in a blockchain platform and, when a second server receives the communication, the tool will compare the components of the message to determine if they are compatible with the first part registered on blockchain.
If the components match, the mail is displayed in the user’s inbox. But if there are inconsistencies, it will go to the spam folder. That is the purpose. Salesforce seeks to ensure that the messages and attachments of those e-mails have not been modified during transit through a network.
The patent explains: “The system can also better identify legitimate (wanted) messages and distinguish them from illegitimate (unsolicited) messages. Used properly, the immutability and distributed nature of blockchain can make it impossible to modify information once it has been committed to blockchain (…) using an immutable ledger similarly applies to “all information, which can include things like sender and recipient information”.
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 Main Reason
Frequently, spammers try to abuse messaging systems to distribute unwanted messages. In order to avoid this fact, the first e-mail message server will record a selected component of the current message into a block to get another approval of nodes.
The blockchain-driven program also could help to improve the existing filters that often fail to differentiate between spam and regular emails, such as promo letters. Salesforce notes that blockchain can also solve issues with the authenticity of medical records, educational transcripts, deeds, property rights, and legal documents.
Similar Projects
The e-mail management platform Credo is also trying to tackle spam using blockchain. Other U.S. companies have been filing patents for blockchain solutions. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is ranked as one of the biggest providers of blockchain-related patent technologies. IBM has filed 89 blockchain patent and the Chinese giant Alibaba has 90 patent applications so far. The most recent patent that IBM has filed is set to maintain safe boundaries between augmented reality (AR) objects in video games and real-world physical locations.
In March, Mark Benioff, CEO at Salesforce, commented that the company was in the process of building a product using blockchain technology during 2018, even though it did not share more details at the time.
The solution that Salesforce presents would be very helpful to guarantee the confidentiality of the information shared by the companies that adopt this system.
By María Rodríguez
