End-users' resource consumption of spam and a 3D anti-spam evaluation framework

Our work is motivated by the challenge of coupling excessive network consumption and control of the consumption; the importance of cost models to quantify and characterize the consumption; and the crucial requirements of controlling techniques to limit the theft of network resources. In this paper, we particularly examine the network consumption of spam. We quantify the end-user's network resource consumption caused by spam as a function of different email retrieving mechanisms, and estimate the financial costs of spam for both residential and business users. The paper also describes our anti-spam rate-limiting tool, MT Proxy, and introduces a general three-dimensional framework to evaluate anti-spam techniques. We examine and compare both traditional and novel anti-spam solutions and show a simple comparison using our model.