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Anti-Spam Measures: Analysis and Design

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Several years ago, Bill Gates famously predicted that spam would soon be defeated. Well, we're not there yet, and this book is proof of that. It describes how antispam measures evolved over recent years. In a competitive feedback loop as spammers responded with adaptive changes to the nature of spam.

One good way to look at this book is to compare it with one of the first books on spam, written in 1998, Stopping Spam. The 9 years between these books led to considerable changes. The biggest difference is the use of a blacklist of domains, applied against links in the message body. A simple and devastatingly effective approach. Easy to understand and implement by an ISP. Yet in 1998, it had occurred to no one. Schryen describes this usage.

Other current ideas include bolting down the mail relays, and securing the sender address. Various ways are mooted, usually involving cryptographic certificates that can be used by a receiving mail provider to authenticate the message or parts thereof. SPF and Domain Keys are explained. But the book devotes space to explaining how deployment of any antispam scheme is also a huge issue. Some methods that require an overhaul of the email protocols, or of other Internet protocols, are awkward for this reason. All the more so if a substantial uptake of the methods across the Internet is needed for efficacy.