Enforcing Email Addresses Privacy Using Tokens

We propose a system which allows users to monitor how their email addresses are used and how they spread over the Internet. This protects the privacy of the user and can reduce the SPAM phenomenon. Our solution does not require changes to the email infrastructure, can be set up by the end user on an individual basis and is compatible with any email client as long as emails are centralized on a server (e.g. an IMAP server). Nevertheless, it requires that people use email messaging quite differently. 1 Towards a Fair Competition between Humans and Robots Anyone can send an email to a given address (which is just a simple string) at basically no cost. Those strings used to be systematically exchanged until robots collected them automatically in every public electronic discussion forum and used them for spamming. That is why today “poor” human users have to face armies of well trained robots which are launched by associations of hackers and spammers. This situation is obviously unfair...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CISC
• Authors: Roman Schlegel, Serge Vaudenay
• Keywords: CISC 2005, Email, Email Infrastructure, Email Sender