Boblet Learned things and Japan diary, by Oli Studholme

Where does Spam come from?

By Oli
At 4:35 AM · Friday, 25 April · 2003
To The ‘Net

BBC had an article on the origins of Spam today, but failed to link to the Center for Democracy and Technology report they quoted, amusing since the BBC’s article is just a shorter, less detailed rewrite (bad BBC). While the CDT’s report has some pretty awful data representations (and few tables of real numbers!), their conclusions were interesting.

• 97% of their spam came from ‘cleartext’ email addresses posted on web pages.
• No spam was received from email addresses that had been written in human-readable form (a at b dot c) or encoded into HTML entities.
• Changing your preferences on a website that has your details is generally successful in stopping spam from that company (84% success)

Unfortunately the most interesting test wasn’t done - do spammers respect removal requests for unsolicited spam? Their 84% success in removal above is with companies they provided email addresses to (which would make it semi-solicited ;-) I remember reading a Wired News story a while back saying that removal requests were generally treated as evidence your email address was working and even better to spam/on-sell. Hrmmm…

I guess I’ll have to be more careful about weblog comment posting and email usage. Spam Gourmet to the rescue!