Yesterday, the US Patent and Trademark Office published a document outlining the concept of Salesforce using blockchain to guarantee the authenticity of e-mails sent to customers.
This system is presumably only available to customers who currently use one of Salesforce’s customer relations products. This is not clarified in the patent, however. The system appears to work with a number of email servers to reach a consensus on what can be regarded as genuine original emails. It is recorded in a block chain if this is confirmed. Secondary email servers then reference this blockchain — a record based on what they have received — to be placed in the inboxes — to the original.
If the secondary servers confirm that the email is correct, they can reach the inbox of the recipient. If not, the e-mail is sent to the spam folder directly. This system ensures that during transmission over a network messages and attachments to these messages are not modified.
The team behind the system have stated that “messaging systems are often abused and used to distribute unwanted or undesirable messages (or other network traffic), which are commonly referred to as spam.”
In addition, spammers do not represent very high entry barriers, making the repetition of unwanted and malicious mailings profitable. In view of the spread of spam, spam filters are often not correct due to incorrect settings. A special blockchain platform reduces the number of such false alarms through the proposed selection system, the document annotations.
The patent clarifies that “The [system] can also better identify legitimate (wanted) messages and distinguish them from illegitimate (unsolicited) messages. Used properly, the immutability and distributed nature of the Blockchain can make it impossible to modify information once it has been committed to the Blockchain.”
Similarly, the use of an immutable library applies to “all information that may include things such as information about the sender and recipient,” the document adds. The suggested system can also be used to confirm the authenticity of medical records, training protocols, documents, property rights, legal documents, etc.
Salesforce, a company with an email distribution platform based on its own cloud, has already evinced interest in Blockchain. In particular, CEO Mark Benioff said this March that the company is looking at the prospects of building a product utilizing Blockchain in 2018, but did not provide any information about the project.