Weeding spammers at the root: A precise approach to spam reduction

Email spam has become one of the most critical threats affecting Internet user experiences. Existing anti-spam techniques, such as spam filters and reputation systems, face growing difficulties due to spammers´ use of multimedia content (which is difficult to filter) and computer zombies (which mask true spammer identity). We propose SpamWeeder, a simple idea for spam prevention, which targets the root of the spam problem - the email address trafficking. SpamWeeder can track the email address trafficking channels, expose the parties at the source of these channels, and precisely block all email from all and only parties belonging to a given distribution channel. SpamWeeder can further generate warnings to users against submitting their email addresses to parties likely to engage in address trafficking. Finally, our approach is transparent to users and can be installed autonomously by an organization intranet, without need for any changes to the rest of the email infrastructure.