Fighting SPAM: Italian legislation in the context of the EU Directives.

In the last ten years the amount of unsolicited bulk emails has increased dramatically, going from 10% of total email traffic to more than 70% in Europe. Spamming consumes an enormous amount of resources, penalizing companies, ISPs, and finally end users. In this paper we first give an overview of the subject, highlighting recent technical approaches for fighting spam which open new avenues for promising research. Then we briefly introduce the US SPAM-ACT 2003, the European Directives concerning the processing of personal data and protection of privacy, and the specific Italian legislation. Finally, we discuss these different legislative approaches in a critical point of view.