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). The authors 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.