We point out the weaknesses of many popular approaches to eliminating E-Mail abuse (spam) and argue in favor of the challenge-response paradigm that, in our opinion, is the only viable way to address the problem at its present stage. We also present an E-Mail server (available under GPL) and a publicly accessible free demo service (see http://sfm.cs.ualberta.ca). Our server exemplifies desirabl...

This memo suggests a file format to be used to inform multiple mail reading user agent programs about the locally-installed facilities for handling mail in various formats. The mechanism is explicitly designed to work with mail systems based Internet mail as defined by RFC’s 821, 822, 934, 1049, 1113, and the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, known as MIME. However, with some extensions it...

In today’s Internet era, electronic mail is replacing telephony and postal mail as the primary means of communication for hundreds of millions of individuals. Free email services, such as Microsoft’s Hotmail and Yahoo’s Yahoo! Mail, each have tens of millions of subscribers. However, these and other current e-mail systems unfortunately are not capable of handling the scale of Internet e-mail us...