Using E-mail Authentication and Disposable E-mail Addressing for Filtering Spam

Abstract

The number of spam mails has spread rapidly in recent years. Currently, the most common spam filtering solutions include blacklisting and content filtering, as well as the Bayesian approach, which uses a Bayesian filter to analyze mail content to generate classifiers. However, spammers can forge their addresses or include additional information that will mislead the filtering system or mark legitimate mail as spam instead, thus wasting the user's time retrieving legitimate mail from the trash folder. The different definitions of users regarding spam make the filtering task even more difficult. Different to traditional filtering systems, we designed a system called mail authentication spam filter system (MASFS) that employs e-mail authentication to allow the user to decide whether the sender is a spammer or not; this process reduces the number of spam mail and the percentage of mistaking legitimate e-mails for spam. MASFS follows the SMTP standards, which is compatible with mail servers that do not have MASFS installed, and users do not need to change their favor mail user agent (MUA); this architecture keeps the influence on users to a minimum.