Multi-Recipient E-mail Messages: Privacy Issues and Possible Solutions

Chain and multi-recipient e-mails pose significant security and privacy threats such as phishing and the spread of Trojan horses. They also increase the chances of receiving spam e-mails. E-mails sent to multiple recipients at a time result in unwanted exposure of e-mail address to multiple recipi...

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Autores principales: SHEIKH, S. A., BANDAY, M. T.
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava 2021
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Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/53dca6976d0045ecb1eeca8b5f35c579
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Sumario:Chain and multi-recipient e-mails pose significant security and privacy threats such as phishing and the spread of Trojan horses. They also increase the chances of receiving spam e-mails. E-mails sent to multiple recipients at a time result in unwanted exposure of e-mail address to multiple recipients. The recipients of chain e-mails may include spammers or e-mail addresses of users whose e-mail account or device may have been compromised, thereby, exposing all e-mail addresses to spammers. Forwarding or sending a multi-recipient e-mail in a chain further increases the exposure of e-mail addresses to spammers. This paper discusses chain e-mails, multi-recipient e-mails and crucial security and privacy threats they pose to legitimate e-mail user. It also discusses various possible mechanisms to mitigate these threats and investigates their effectiveness. This study proposes a novel technique to counter these security risks by enhancing the default behaviour of e-mail client, SMPT server and SMTP protocol. The proposed technique has been implemented in the Java programming language which showed promising results against unnecessary exposure of multiple e-mail addresses while sending an e-mail to multiple recipients.