Study Released on Spam

The Centre for Democracy & Technology (the "Centre") conducted a study seeking to determine the sources of spam. In particular, in the summer of 2002, the Centre set up hundreds of different email addresses. After waiting six months, the Centre sought to establish what kind of email those addresses received. The Centre concluded that, depending on where the email addresses were used, different volumes of spam were received and different methods were used by those sending the spam. An example of the Centre results included a finding that most spam was attracted to addresses that were posted on websites or in newsgroups. The spammers used software harvesting programs to collect email addresses. The Centre tested methods of obstructing spam by replacing email addresses with the HTML equivalent and replacing characters in an email with readable equivalents (ex: rather than using @ and .com, it was written out as "at" and "dot com"). Email addresses using these obstruction methods did not receive Spam. Despite its findings, the Centre maintains that there is no foolproof way to prevent spam, and that even users that are very careful are still prone to spam. For a copy of the study, visit: http://makeashorterlink.com/?U21A353F3