Privacy What Developers and IT Professionals Should Know

Antispam Approaches

This section looks at several approaches that have been taken to combat spam. Most of these are techniques that have been incorporated into tools and larger applications. The last two are approaches with which many of us could become more involved:

• Accept list— This is a list of e-mail addresses or domains that are determined to be trusted. This list is built over time as the user determines which e-mails are spam and which ones are legitimate. The drawback to the approach is that spammers often use fake e-mail addresses to evade being identified by these lists. For example, I often get e-mails that have my e-mail address as the sender. This approach also requires constant interaction from the user.

• Block list^[17]— This is ...