How to beat spammers at their own game
DON'T think about blocking spam - imagine instead that you are playing a game against the spammers, with cash at stake. That's how businesses and internet service providers (ISPs) can improve their email filters, according to a new model of online confrontations.
Spam filters attempt to screen out unsolicited emails before they reach an inbox by studying each message's characteristics, including where it was sent from and the type of words it contains. But no spam filter is perfect. If tuned to be more "aggressive" it will reject some legitimate mail as spam; if its aggression is toned down, it will let some spam sneak through.
Now Ion Androutsopoulos, Evangelos Magirou and Dimitrios Vassilakis at Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece say the way to find the perfect balance is to model the interaction between spammers and email users as a game between two players. This model allows them to calculate the cost to email users of a particular filter.
