Spam and the Ongoing Battle for the Inbox

Joshua Goodman, Gordon Cormack, and David Heckerman

Louis SzgalskyAndrew Burns

Summary

• 1998, 10% of email spam• Now, 80% of email spam• New technologies used to detect

spam• Advances in machine learning

Two Main Spam Fighters

• Cryptograpic standards– PGP, S/MIME– Robust to attacks, but hard to

implement

• Domain Identities– SenderID, DKIM– Use DKS to distribute key information

Ethics Issues

• Privacy Issues– People don’t want email address

freely known.

• Resource issues– Mail serves must handle all incoming

mail.

Opinion

• Good information on fight between spammers and spam-fighters

• Too much on how to organize research