Spam and Anti-Spam Measures: A Look at Potential Impacts

The proliferation of unrestricted Internet access has brought the community spam which has become a serious problem costing companies billions of dollars per annum. Typical anti-spam measures, such as filtering and blocking techniques, exist but focus on solving the spam problem on the message transportation level. Using such techniques may have impacts beyond the realm of spam-filters and block lists. In this paper we argue that implementing typical anti-spam measures means that computers are assigned the power to assess legitimacy of email. This means, for example, that legitimate email might be rejected because the sender used the 'wrong' mail server or the wrong terminology. In this paper, we describe some of the core problems and discuss alternatives.