A Monitor Tool for Anti-Spam Mechanisms and Spammers Behavior

Sending spam is a profitable activity for spammers and more than 95% of the Internet messages will be spams in a near future. This paper presents a tool that helps developers of anti-spam systems to monitor the current spammer behavior, monitor the performance of current anti-spam systems, and analyze new anti-spam mechanisms developed. Performance analyses for the mostly used anti-spam mechanisms are provided and the tool can be easily extended to analyze new anti-spam systems. Some characteristics of the processes used by the spammers to harvest electronic addresses, create the messages, and send them are also evaluated. The results show the low efficiency of the analyzed anti-spam mechanisms. Moreover, results also show important characteristics of the harvest and email sending processes, such as the high delay between the two processes and the long period of time that addresses are kept on spammers´ lists.