A Study of Email Spam and How to Effectively Combat It

This paper presents the results of researching the issues pertaining to email spam on Bahrain's email society and how to combat it. We have surveyed the status of spam amongst the Bahraini community through a carefully prepared questionnaire and studied the effects of spam on the social and economical welfare of Bahrainis. The research results stress the need to regulate spam spread through the introduction of a spam law. The overwhelming majority of the Bahraini email community expresses concern with receiving spam but some would still prefer to continue to receive some sort of controlled spam especially commercial advertising spam. The paper addresses the different concerns expressed by the email community and measures the levels of these concerns in terms of age, gender, work productivity. This paper is aimed at setting the pace for regulating and raising the level of awareness of email spam in the Arab countries.