Armed for the Spam Battle: A Technological and Organizational Infrastructure Framework

Spamming remains a form of Internet abuse, which burdens the Internet infrastructure, is generally regarded as an annoyance, and is said to cause economic harm to the tune of about several billion US$ per year. Many technological, organizational, and legislative anti-spam measures have already been proposed and implemented, but have not led to any substantial decrease in the number of spam e-mails. We propose in this a new infrastructure framework that combines several anti-spam measures in a framework that features both a technological and an organizational facet. The key element of our infrastructure is a new organizational unit that reliably and transparently limits the number of e-mails that can be sent per day and per account. This paper first gives an overview of the framework, and then it provides technological and organizational details of the infrastructure, the deployment of which depends to a large degree on its acceptance and propagation by the ICANN, the ISOC, and by large e-mail service providers. Finally, the paper discusses the limitations and drawbacks of the proposed framework