Description
Unsolicited commercial email has become a major threat for email communication. Although the degree of sophistication of spam filters has increased over time, such filters still produce high rates of false positives and false negatives, thereby reducing the reliability of email and introducing communication risks on their own. Due to more and more complex filtering methods implemented, the hardware requirements for mail servers are increasing to avoid the risk of denial of service situations. Therefore, some authors point out that mail filtering has reached its limits and ask for more preventive solutions to fight spam. One way to prevent email abuse would be to significantly increase the risk of a spammer being sued for damage compensation or, if legislation permits, for criminal offence. This approach believes in an assessment of risk and expected revenue by a the offender. But by hiding their real identity, spammers are very successful in evading prosecution. This paper discusses several methods to identify spammers and analyses under which circumstances those methods might be valid evidence in court.