Fighting SPAM

The number of spams is constantly rising and the losses caused by it reach billions of dollars per year. Anti-spam mechanisms are used in order to reduce the number of spams that reaches users' mailboxes. However these mechanisms can cause false-positives, when legitimate messages are classified as spams. False-positives can cause many losses, including financial losses due to delays and lost opportunities. This way, a mechanism to reduce false-positives can be very beneficial for users and its organizations. Common anti-spam mechanisms currently used don't take into consideration the users' behavior history when they analyze the users' messages. For a legitimate user, each message is analyzed without taking into consideration if the user has already sent many legitimate messages. A user that has a history of sending legitimate messages will probably continue to send legitimate messages. We are currently working on an anti-spam system which takes into account the history of messages sent by the user to decide if a new message is spam or not. A simple authentication system is used to authenticate the users, so we can keep a track of the users' behavior. To improve the performance, a reputation system is used to exchange information about the users' behavior history with other servers, so more information about the users' behavior is available to take the decision.

Selected Publications

• Taveira, D. M., and Duarte, O. C. M. B. - "A Monitor Tool for Anti-spam Mechanisms and Spammers Behavior", in 6th IEEE International Workshop on End-to-End Monitoring Techniques and Services - E2EMON 2008, Salvador, BA, Brazil, April 2008 (GTA-08-07).
• Taveira, D. M. and Duarte, O. C. M. B. - "Mecanismo Anti-Spam Baseado em Autenticação e Reputação", in XXVI Simpósio Brasileiro de Redes de Computadores - SBRC'2008, pp. 861-874, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, May 2008 (GTA-07-27).