How Spam Finds You

Unsolicited bulk e-mail — spam — could account for as much as 70 percent of global e-mail traffic by 2007. Each day, Internet giant America Online blocks up to 2.4 billion spam e-mails from members’ mailboxes. How do spammers find their victims? Mostly through e-mail addresses posted on public Web sites (for example, when companies ...

577623_091104_SpamFindsYou5.jpg
577623_091104_SpamFindsYou5.jpg

Unsolicited bulk e-mail -- spam -- could account for as much as 70 percent of global e-mail traffic by 2007. Each day, Internet giant America Online blocks up to 2.4 billion spam e-mails from members' mailboxes. How do spammers find their victims? Mostly through e-mail addresses posted on public Web sites (for example, when companies provide e-mail contacts for their employees). Contrary to popular online myth, little spam results from online purchases or the unauthorized sharing of e-mail addresses. The graph below shows the results of a six-month study by the Center for Democracy and Technology (www.cdt.org) in which more than 250 test e-mail addresses received 8,842 spam messages.

Unsolicited bulk e-mail — spam — could account for as much as 70 percent of global e-mail traffic by 2007. Each day, Internet giant America Online blocks up to 2.4 billion spam e-mails from members’ mailboxes. How do spammers find their victims? Mostly through e-mail addresses posted on public Web sites (for example, when companies provide e-mail contacts for their employees). Contrary to popular online myth, little spam results from online purchases or the unauthorized sharing of e-mail addresses. The graph below shows the results of a six-month study by the Center for Democracy and Technology (www.cdt.org) in which more than 250 test e-mail addresses received 8,842 spam messages.

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