Preventing E-mail Spam: The Conceptualization and the Analysis of an Infrastructure Framework

Spamming remains a form of Internet abuse, which burdens the Internet infrastructure, is generally regarded as an annoyance, and is said to cause a huge economic harm. Many technological, organizational, and legislative anti-spam measures have already been proposed and implemented, but have not led to any substantial decrease in the number of spam e-mails. We propose a scalable and flexible infrastructure framework that integrates several anti-spam measures and that features both a technological and an organizational facet. The key element of our infrastructure is a new organizational unit that reliably and transparently limits the number of e-mails that can be sent per day and per account. We also analyze the proposed framework in terms of its theoretical effectiveness, the required resources, and its limitations.