Napier University

Fighting against spam: an evaluation of individual strategies

With the growth of the Internet, companies can now target and contact a huge number of potential customers at a very low cost. China, South Korea and the USA (despite the US CAN-spam law in 2003) are the three main countries that produce spam (Messaging Pipeline, 2005, August 12, para 1). The international community has tried to work together to find out a solution. For example, in early 2005, at The European Commission Initiative, 13 countries decided to work together against spam (Thomas, 2005). However, in 2004 the UK government adopted a law which does not criminalize spamming (Nicolas, 2005, August 16). Despite these efforts to minimise spam, it increased by 43.2% between July 2004 and July 2005 (Messaging Pipeline, 2005, August 12).

Many solutions have been proposed to counter spamming, but at the same time, spammers� technological capabilities have increased. Spam wastes time for employees, and forces organisations to invest in software.
The aim of the research, based partly on a replication of Phil Bradley�s 2002 experiment using dummy e-mail accounts (Bradley, 2002), in combination with a survey of e-mail user practice, is to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of individual strategies used to minimise the receipt of spam.