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The Outbox Reconstruction Database  (idea #151)
Date: 2006-06-16 
Category: Service
Price: Free
Target Audience: Socially-experimental web database hackers

Description: Want to read every email ever sent by a certain person (or, at least, from a certain email account)? Visit the Outbox Reconstruction Database! The ORD is a collaborative project to reconstruct people's email outboxes. Contributing to the project is easy-- just forward any emails you've received to the project's "submissions" email address, and they'll be automatically indexed by From: address, Date: timestamp, and all other header info, and stored in a publicly-searchable database. A boon to journalists, researchers, and even blackmailers and revenge-seekers, the ORD lets people collaboratively archive each others' entire lives of online correspondence. Easy-run utilities let contributors upload the entire saved contents of their email accounts to the ORD, and optionally forward all future correspondence to the project database as well. Note that the database cannot identify counterfeit submissions from spoofed addresses, and verifying content is ultimately the responsibility of the user, but its search interface lets you process messages' complete header information, to help flag or ignore contributions from questionable sources. Funding for the ORD, which requires minimal human maintenance, comes from online advertisements and contributions from pro-surveillance interests.

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