Salesforce plans to use blockchain to fight spam emails

Salesforce has been granted a patent that would see it use blockchain technology to authenticate its users’ emails.

Salesforce is a hugely popular service for companies and individuals to conduct email marketing campaigns, but the service also means that it can be used to send spam to unwilling recipients. The firm now wants to use blockchain to prevent this.

The application reads: “To address the issues discussed above, systems and methods are provided that use blockchain (or equivalent) technologies to address challenges presented in message delivery and integrity. In one embodiment, a messaging system is provided that includes a first message server, a second message server and a distributed database system that stores a blockchain.”

In April we reported that Salesforce was planning its own blockchain solution, to be ready in September 2018. It’s possible that this is what was teased.

At the time, co-founder Marc Benioff said: “I had been thinking a lot about what is Salesforce’s strategy around blockchain, and what is Salesforce’s strategies around cryptocurrencies and how will we relate to all of these things… A lot comes from paying attention, listening. There are new ideas coming all the time.”

Bank of America recently released a report also pegged Salesforce as one of the cloud services that stand to benefit most from blockchain technology, with the caveat that not enough use cases have yet been identified or built.