Hello,
Apologize if it is not allowed to post paper here.
Attached please find an abtract paper of Getmail. Any comments are
appreciated. (below is some high level description of the architecture and
some of the advantages.)
We propose a new message delivery architecture, called Getmail.
The principal idea behind Getmail is to force the spammer to dedicate
storage for the Emails being sent out. Instead of the entire message
being directly delivered to the receiver (or more precisely
the receiver side Mail Transfer Agent, MTA) from the sender, only the
message header (including the ubject line with a limited length) is
sent to the receiver. The message header is augmented with a field informing
where the receiver can retrieve the complete Email.
There are several advantages of this architecture. First, Getmail forces
the senders to maintain their messages and keep their MTA servers up,
before receivers retrieve the messages. Thus Getmail makes it relatively
easy to
identify spammers and facilitates the design of schemes that rely on IP
addresses to block spam messages. Of course, spammers can still crack
into other users'
machines to send spam, but clearly it is orthogonal to the problem we
are dealing with here and beyond the scope of this paper. Second, in
the
current system it costs money and time for receivers to receive and
handle spams, this is especially true for users who dial up to
their ISPs. By only delivering message headers from senders to
receivers, less bandwidth, storage, and time will be occupied at the
receiver side, and
senders will have a greater share of responsibility in managing the
messages they send. For example, senders hold their messages until they
are retrieved by receivers and clean up the messages that are not read
by receivers for a certain amount of time.
Third, by forcing sender side
MTA servers to hold messages, spammers will notice that a large portion
of the spam messages are not read at all. As a consequence, the
incentive to send spams is reduced. Moreover, in the
long run, spammers will learn who are interested in a certain specific
advertisement (the ones who read the spam message), and commercial
advertisement can be targeted at a certain group of interested
receivers, instead of being sent blindly to everyone. In this way, both
advertisers and Internet users will benefit from this learning process in
a long run.
-Zhenhai
============================================
Zhenhai Duan
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-4530
Phone: (850) 645-1561
Fax: (850) 644-0058
Email: duan(_at_)cs(_dot_)fsu(_dot_)edu
URL: http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~duan
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paper.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document