Penny Post - Computational Proof For Spam Fighting

This paper∞ was written while developing the initial version of PennyPost and describes the motivation and goals of the original project.
While the project has moved forward since the paper was written and many open issues discussed in the paper are now dealt with, chapter 2 of the paper provides very useful background information about approaches to computational-proof for spam fighting and the mozilla platform∞ in general. Chapter 3 then describes how these ideas have been put together to create PennyPost.

Abstract

Spam has become a growing problem in electronic mail. Computational proof for spam fighting is an innovative solution that makes senders “pay” for sending email using computational effort rather than money.
In theory, a verifiable proof must be attached to the email that convinces the receiver that the sender spent computational effort just for that message and that receiver. In practise however, no existing email clients actually allow senders and receivers of email to
actively compute or verify such proofs. Due to lack of support in existing email clients this system has largely remained a backstage research topic.
This paper∞ discusses the implementation of a system for Mozilla Thunderbird which enables users to compute such proofs and runs on existing email infrastructure. The system also implements a previously un-implemented pricing algorithm MBound.

---

CategoryImplementationDocs