Complementing E-Mails With Distinct, Geographic Location Information in Packet-Switched IP Networks

Although the Internet has developed into a mass-medium for communication and information exchange over the last couple of years, many problems still exist regarding security and anonymity. One of these Achilles' Heels is spam. Electronic mail (e-mail) has become one of the most used communication mechanism. It is absolutely easy to use and cost-effective. Unfortunately, the simplicity and effectiveness of e-mail are also major drawbacks. Without additional effort, Internet users' mailboxes are flooded with unsolicited, bulk e-mails of many different flavors; mostly without any chance to identify the true origin. Thus, most anti-spam techniques rely on spam detection using large filter data bases and pattern matching functions but cannot identify the trust-ability of the sender.