Salesforce Wins Patent Tackling Email Spam With Blockchain

Software giant Salesforce has won a patent outlining how a blockchain-based platform can be used to prevent spam or other unwanted emails from plaguing people's inboxes.

According to a document published Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a blockchain-based platform can be leveraged to check whether emails are changed or otherwise tampered with after being sent through a custom matching system.

The proposed platform would use a matching system to determine whether an email being sent is legitimate or not.

When a second email server receives the message, it will compare a component to determine whether it matches the section recorded onto the blockchain.

If the components match, the email will continue to the inbox, whereas if there is a discrepancy, the email will be marked as spam.

Using a blockchain platform can reduce the number of false positives through the proposed matching system, the document says.

"The [system] can also better identify legitimate messages and distinguish them from illegitimate 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."

Salesforce, which runs a cloud-based email distribution platform, among other products, has expressed interest in leveraging blockchain before.

In March, its CEO, Mark Benioff, said the company was looking into building a product using blockchain for sometime in 2018, though he did not provide details on the project.

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