by Desislava Stankova | Jan 31, 2015 | E-Commerce, News and Events, Privacy and Data Protection
More than thirty years after the famous Monty Python sketch, spam has now become a worldwide implicating problem that grows exponentially every year. Most often defined as an “unsolicited commercial e-mail” or “unsolicited bulk e-mail”, spam messages are estimated to be between 45% and 70% of all incoming e-mails. Damages from spamming include communication service disruption, decrease in productivity (the average employee productivity loss per year due to spam is approximately 1200 minutes), security breaches, increased costs for anti spam techniques and activities, reputation damages, etc. Since it is now undoubted that spam seriously interfere with the business operations of companies (ISPs and end users), as well it is more than a nuisance for the regular individual internet user, a proactive solution to the problem should be developed. Different anti spam techniques have been discussed, including technical measures, legal and informal measures such as self regulation. The results are quite clear – no single type of measure is capable of completely eradicating the spam trouble, so using a multilateral approach, which includes all of the abovementioned measures at the same time, should be adopted. Technological measures As already mentioned, multiple direct and indirect companies` and individual users` losses are attributable to spam and a versatile approach should be found. Unsolicited messages consume a substantial amount of traffic and bandwidth capacity, storage, time and money, and the technological means to combat them should be the first line of defense. Such measures mainly include filtering out and blocking techniques, whose main types and features will be presented. Filtering in this paper is used as s generic term that includes all kind...
