IBM has announced new anti-spam technology based on the identity of the sender.

Fair Use of Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (FairUCE) looks at the e-mail domain, the address and the IP addres of the sending computer.

Identity management software can then establish the relationship and declare the message either as spam or legitimate. The operation all takes place at the network level.

The technique means more e-mails are rejected before they get to the filtering software. This means the filters can be more efficient.

Once the IP address has been identified with a spammer, then it can be added to a blacklist. The computer in question could be the spammers or a "zombie". A zombie is a pc which has been taken over by the bad guys using malware.

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