An approach to preventing spam using Access Codes with a combination of anti-spam mechanisms

Spam is becoming a more and more severe problem for individuals, networks, organisations and businesses. The losses caused by spam are billions of dollars every year. Research shows that spam contributes more than 80% of e-mails with an increased in its growth rate every year. Spam is not limited to emails; it has started affecting other technologies like VoIP, cellular and traditional telephony, and instant messaging services. None of the approaches (including legislative, collaborative, social awareness and technological) separately or in combination with other approaches, can prevent sufficient of the spam to be deemed a solution to the spam problem. The severity of the spam problem and the limitations of the state-of-the-Art solutions create a strong need for an efficient anti-spam mechanism that can prevent significant volumes of spam without showing any false positives. This can be achieved by an efficient anti-spam mechanism such as the proposed anti-spam mechanism known as "Spam Prevention using Access Codes", SPAC. SPAC targets spam from two angles i.e. to prevent/block spam and to discourage spammers by making the infrastructure environment very unpleasant for them. In addition to the idea of Access Codes, SPAC combines the ideas behind some of the key current technological anti-spam measures to increase effectiveness. The difference in this work is that SPAC uses those ideas effectively and combines them in a unique way which enables SPAC to acquire the good features of a number of technological anti-spam approaches without showing any of the drawbacks of these approaches. Sybil attacks, Dictionary attacks and address spoofing have no impact on the performance of SPAC. In fact SPAC functions in a similar way (i.e. as for unknown persons) for these sorts of attacks. An application known as the "SPAC application" has been developed to test the performance of the SPAC mechanism. The results obtained from various tests on the SPAC application show that SPAC has a clear edge over the existing anti-spam technological approaches.