Communications of the ACM
Rethinking the design of the Internet: the end-to-end arguments vs. the brave new world
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT)
Fighting the spam wars: A remailer approach with restrictive aliasing
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT)
EC '04 Proceedings of the 5th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Understanding the network-level behavior of spammers
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Email prioritization: reducing delays on legitimate mail caused by junk mail
ATEC '04 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Advantages and vulnerabilities of pull-based email-delivery
AISC '10 Proceedings of the Eighth Australasian Conference on Information Security - Volume 105
An empirical study of behavioral characteristics of spammers: Findings and implications
Computer Communications
A survey of emerging approaches to spam filtering
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Grindstone4Spam: An optimization toolkit for boosting e-mail classification
Journal of Systems and Software
Optimization of Anti-Spam Systems with Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms
Information Resources Management Journal
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Unsolicited commercial email, commonly known as spam, has become a pressing problem in today's Internet. In this paper, we re-examine the architectural foundations of the current email delivery system that are responsible for the proliferation of email spam. We argue that the difficulties in controlling spam stem from the fact that the current email system is fundamentally sender-driven and distinctly lacks receiver control over email delivery. Based on these observations we propose a Differentiated Mail Transfer Protocol (DMTP), which grants receivers greater control over how messages from different senders should be delivered on the Internet. In addition, we also develop a simple mathematical model to study the effectiveness of DMTP in controlling spam. Through numerical experiments we demonstrate that DMTP can effectively reduce the maximum revenue that a spammer can gather. Moreover, compared to the current SMTP-based email system, the proposed email system can force spammers to stay online for longer periods of time, which may significantly improve the performance of various real-time blacklists of spammers. In addition, DMTP provides an incremental deployment path from the current SMTP-based system in today's Internet.