Address control

Mailtraq brings you excellent anti-spam measures, using both conventional and novel approaches to protect you. There is no need to explain how much of a problem SPAM is for you. The modern Internet plague is a drain on both resources and time, but is remarkably hard to fight effectively.

In the Mailtraq Development Group this topic has been discussed regularly and the general opinion is that fighting SPAM with traditional methods will never solve the problem.

Examining the problem more closely, every SPAM message has three elements :-

1. 1. 1. The sender's address
      2. The message data
      3. and your address

The conventional approaches deal with (1) and (2). Mailtraq already has the ability to match the sender address against Relay Black Lists and it is not difficult to scan for common SPAM keywords in the message. However, these are constantly changing, and you don't have any control over them. What doesn't change, and what is in your control, is your own address.

Where does most SPAM come from?

Not surprisingly, SPAM sources have to obtain your address from somewhere. Typically this is done by the SPAM author obtaining address lists. There are really only two ways to get on a list: either you submit your e-mail address (typically when filling out a web page form on an Internet site, or posting to an untrusted recipient), or your address is farmed by an address harvester.

Harvesting simply means some robot scans web pages, the Usenet, and other published data for e-mail addresses.

So if you only sent e-mail to trusted recipients and never gave your address out to anybody or posted any public messages, you probably wouldn't receive any SPAM at all.

Unfortunately that isn't possible for everybody, hence Mailtraq's novel approach to preventing SPAM with Temporary Addresses

But when you are "giving your address to the public" -- you are typically only doing so with the intention of receiving responses for a limited period. If you think about it, when you fill in a form you typically only wish to receive replies immediately, not three months later. The same applies to the Usenet, Web-forms and socail network interactions: when you post an article you are only really interested in replies prior to the article's expiry.

Temporary Addresses

This is where the concept of Temporary Addresses comes in. Mailtraq now supports the concept of an e-mail address that has an explicit expiry in it.

There are two types supported: explicit temporary addresses and concealed addresses.

Temporary addresses

Concealed addresses