Beyond Identity: Addressing Problems that Persist in an Electronic Mail System with Reliable Sender Identification

Brett Watson
2004 International Conference on Email and Anti-Spam  
Many abuses of the Internet's electronic mail system rely on its intrinsic lack of reliable sender identification, and many parties have proposed schemes to retro-fit sender identification into the system to combat such abuse. This paper considers what the spam problem and its countermeasures would be like under a theoretically ideal sender identification scheme, with some attention to the resource consumption the countermeasures entail-the economics of spam. Analysis suggests that no one
more » ... technique is likely to prove adequate, but a blended approach could be effective. Such an approach will create a need for integrated policy management facilities in future mail user agents. 1 "Phishing" is the act of impersonating an organisation via email with intent to cause customers of that organisation to divulge sensitive information, such as passwords. See . 2 3 This is extremely similar to the "responsible submitter" proposal of [1], but I emphasise that my "sender identity" system is a purely imaginary construct (existing only for the purpose of argument) which implements a theoretically perfect sender identification scheme.
dblp:conf/ceas/Watson04 fatcat:ovx5xlr7k5arrd2nle7ilg3tee