A Multifaceted Approach to Spam Reduction

As we think about the history of spam reduction, we can see a gradual change in the approach over time, as the spam problem has changed. Many of us may think of spam as a new problem, but in fact, it goes back at least to 1975, as noted by the late Jon Postel.[1] At the start users were mostly “techies”, and spam mostly referred to Usenet newsgroup posts that got out of hand, wherein someone would post a message to dozens or hundreds of newsgroups – a message that was unrelated to most or all of the newsgroups to which it was posted. Then, social and administrative action was sufficient: the perpetrator was castigated, perhaps privately, perhaps publicly; repeat offenders would quickly be added to “kill lists”. And so, early spam filtering simply identified “bad senders”.