CSC 379 SUM2008:Week 1, Group 4

The Effects of Spam-Countermeasures

Fighting against spam is difficult when its countermeasures come at a cost as well. E-mail is not just storage; much resources must be devoted to its processing, and the cost of efforts from virus scans of content to filtering all can be significant. Aggressive countermeasures have a negative impact on productivity, when the number of “false positives” is too great (legitimate emails incorrectly filed as spam). Examine the breadth of countermeasures available to combat spam, providing a brief review of the ethical considerations each raise, and links to online resources that cite specific instances or effects of each.

Spam Countermeasures

Server-Side Spam Filters

These filters scan and quarantine spam before the end-user even know it exists.

Possible concerns - privacy, accuracy

Pay-per-email

Problems: Absolutely Insane

Do-Not-Spam Lists

Will probably work as well as the do-not-call list, that is, barely at all.

User-Defined Spam Filters

Many popular email systems (such as gmail and ncsu's webmail) now provide "client"-side filtering of emails that are determined to be spam. These filters work by scanning emails for spam-related phrases such as "offer" or "male enhancement!!11!11!1" and quarantine emails that meet these pre-determined conditions. The obvious negative of this system is the possibility of legitimate emails being missed/trashed because they accidentally met the conditions to be considered spam. The major benefit of client-side filtering is the ability of the user to set the conditions rather than a corporate entity where censorship might come into play.

Captchas (Image Recognition Logins)

Captchas, aka the cryptic text filled images you must decode before you make an account/post on many webpages, offer an additional layer of security where spam or bots might pose a threat. The thought here is that bots will not be able to read the text where a human would have no problem, therefore eliminating the bots ability to create fake accounts or posts on servers.

Recently captcha-reading-capable bots have been created that threaten the future of captchas as a security technique.