Spam and the Ongoing Battle for the Inbox Joshua Goodman, Gordon Cormack, and David Heckerman Louis Szgalsky Andrew Burns

Summary • 1998, 10% of email spam • Now, 80% of email spam • New technologies used to detect spam • Advances in machine learning

Two Main Spam Fighters • Cryptograpic standards – PGP, S/MIME – Robust to attacks, but hard to implement • Domain Identities – SenderID, DKIM – Use DKS to distribute key information

Ethics Issues • Privacy Issues – People don’t want email address freely known.

• Resource issues – Mail serves must handle all incoming mail.

Opinion • Good information on fight between spammers and spam-fighters • Too much on how to organize research