Technical Solutions for Controlling Spam

As the commercialisation of the Internet continues, unsolicited bulk email has reached epidemic proportions as more and more marketers’ turn to bulk email as a viable advertising medium. Concern about the proliferation of unsolicited bulk email, or spam, has continued to grow, with the Internet community increasingly turning to both regulatory and technical solutions to alleviate the problem. While marketers seek to reach a larger and larger audience as an attempt to increase their returns, consumers are seeking effective means to avoid being targeted. There is already a broad range of counter measures to deal with the problem of spam, some of which have been successfully deployed in commercial environments. This paper will attempt to evaluate some of the existing technical solutions to control the ever-increasing volume of unsolicited bulk email.