Inexpensive Email Addresses

This work proposes an effective method of fighting spam by developing Inexpensive Email Addresses (IEA), a system of Disposable Email Addresses (DEAs). IEA can cryptographically generate exclusive email addresses for each sender, with the ability to re-establish a new email address once the old one is compromised. IEA accomplishes proof-of-work by integrating a challenge-response mechanism to be completed before an email is accepted in the recipient’s mail system. The system rejects all incoming emails and instead embeds the challenge inside the rejection notice of Standard Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) error messages. The system does not create an out-of-band email for the challenge, thus eliminating email backscatter in comparison to other challenge-response email systems. The system is also effective in identifying spammers by exposing the exact channel, i.e. the unique email address that was compromised, so misuse could be traced back to the compromising party. Usability is of utmost concern in building such a system by making it friendly to the end-user and easy to setup and maintain by the system administrator.