A mailbox ownership based mechanism for curbing spam

Abstract

Not only does Spam put strain on computational and network resources, it also drains the attention resource of users. Existing approaches to combat spam make decisions on per sender or per message basis. Where the former demands explicit intervention by users, the latter suffers from false negatives and positives. We take an owned-resource view of email spam. An email recipient’s attention space as well as computational and network resources devoted to handling email are viewed as precious owned resources. Anyone interested in using these resources – by sending a message which must be delivered and stored on a server and subsequently viewed in a list of received messages, and possibly read – must purchase the resource in the form of sending rights. These rights may be to resources owned by individuals and groups, and may also be owned by individuals or group. Our approach is based on the CyberOrgs model for encapsulating distributed owned resources for multi-agent computations. The model uses a small set of primitive operations to enable multi-agent computations to engage in a rich set of interactions in a market of owned resources. We have developed key mechanisms to enable message senders and recipients to negotiate contracts for mailbox access, as well as to construct policies leading to implicit and automatic negotiations for typical cases. A prototype implementation is described, and examples of policies are presented. Experimental results show that system performance is policy-dependent: as long as policies are carefully designed, negotiation overhead is minimal.