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I feel we need a "proof of work by human" for emails. Something that could be signed that attests that someone took the time to write the email, not just sent a template / used AI to auto-generate a personal looking email, etc. Sure that could be gamed as well (have an AI write characters one by one to look more human-like), but taking more time usually is a fairly good blocker for spammers / salespersons / etc.
I would love for a proof of human work to exist, but how would you even do that? It would need to be monitoring the user activity in their email client, which isn't something that can be trusted by a server (and is pretty shady).

But that makes me think of Hashcash, that was developed to limit email spam via proof of work, but I don't think that has ever been used in practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash (and of course wouldn't work for the proof of humanness you're talking about).

I want to give my bank my public key (preferable at a branch), so that ANY comms coming from them I can prove it came from them as.
What about automated signup confirmation emails, just as one example?
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