A policy driven approach to email services

The primary original design goal for email was to provide best-effort message delivery. Unfortunately, as the ever increasing uproar over SPAM demonstrates, the existing email infrastructure is no longer well suited to the worldwide set of email users - particularly email receivers. Rather than propose yet another band-aid solution to SPAM, this paper rethinks email from the requirements perspective, albeit with the constraint of designing a system suitable for incremental adoption in the current environment. Our result to this exercise is a policy driven email service in which the interests of each principal can be articulated and accommodated. Our scheme rewards faithful senders with better quality of service and discourages misbehavior. Our scheme provides receivers with policy-driven control over whether and how a given message appears in the recipients mailbox.