Reducing Spam via Trustworthy Self Regulation by Email Senders

This paper introduces an email sending technique, called trustworthy self regulation (TSR), which enables the receiver of an email message to recognize the sending protocol that generated it. The availability of this sending technique is expected to help induce email users to send messages via spam-immune protocols preferred by their destination users—thus producing less spam. The TSR email sending technique, in turn, employs a middleware called law-governed interaction (LGI). The TSR-based communication involves no text-based filtering, no dependency on blacklistings, and no coercion by ISPs. And it can be deployed incrementally, because it can operate along with all these conventional anti-spam measures, as a complement to them, and because it involves no changes to the SMTP protocol. If widely deployed, we claim that the TSR-based email would result in a significant reduction of traffic of spam over the Internet, and of unwanted emails that individual users have to contend with. And these results would be achieved without incurring the undesirable side effects of conventional anti-spam measures, like the blocking of valid mail by filtering, and by coercive measures imposed by ISPs. However, wide deployment of TSR over the Internet would require the deployment of the trusted infrastructure of LGI, which is yet to be done.