Evaluating the Use of Spam-Triggered TCP/IP Rate Control to Protect SMTP Servers

Overview

This paper examines an approach to spam mitigation that rate limits incoming TCP/IP connections to an SMTP server based on the real-time detection of spam within the SMTP message exchange. Our approach is motivated by a desire to cause increased resource consumption at the spammer end of each SMTP connection, and to avoid the negative impact of false-positives by eventually allowing all emails through. It is called as the tool MT Proxy. MT ProxyĂ­s spam analysis and traffic differentiation characteristic are analyzed to evaluate the efficacy of this architectural approach to fighting spam.