Fighting Spam by Breaking the Econonmy of Advertisment by Unsolicited Emails

TL;DR

This paper proposes a decentralized peer-to-peer anti-spam strategy that increases costs for spam-advertised websites and reduces spam revenue by coordinating opt-out requests, thereby disrupting the spam economy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel peer-to-peer coordination mechanism with a paranoid trust model to combat spam by increasing website traffic and decreasing revenues.

Findings

Implementation exists for Thunderbird email client.

The approach effectively disrupts the spam economy.

Increased website traffic during campaigns reduces spam profitability.

Abstract

Unsolicited email (spam) is still a problem for users of the email service. Even though current email anti-spam solutions filter most spam emails, some spam emails still are delivered to the inbox of users. A special class of spam emails advertises websites, e.g., online dating sites or online pharmacies. The success rate of this kind of advertisement is rather low, however, as sending an email does only involve minimal costs, even a very low success rate results in enough revenue such that this kind of advertisement pays off. The anti-spam approach presented in this paper aims on increasing the costs for websites that are advertised by spam emails and on lowering the revenues from spam. Costs can be increased for a website by increasing traffic. Revenues can be decreased by making the website slow responding, hence some business gets lost. To increase costs and decreased revenues a decentralized peer-to-peer coordination mechanism is used to have mail clients to agree on a start date and time for an anti-spam campaign. During a campaign, all clients that received spam emails advertings a website send an opt-out request to this website. A huge number of opt-out requests results in increased traffic to this website and will likely result in a slower responsibility of the website. The coordination mechanism presented in this paper is based on a peer-to-peer mechanisms and a so-called paranoid trust model to avoid manipulation by spammers. An implementation for the Thunderbird email client exist. The anti-spam approach presented in this paper breaks the economy of spam, hence makes advertisement by unsolicited emails unattractive.