Briefs

April 24, 2003. BBC reports that Researchers at the Center for Democracy and Technology conducted a study to determine how exactly spammers get hold of email addresses. The project, which commenced last summer, involved the establishment of 250 addresses that were posted on Web sites and newsgroups; some of these addresses were posted in response to services on eBay and other popular sites, as well as auctions, discussion boards, and jobs. In addition, the researchers published addresses in the Whois domain-name owner database. By studying the emails these addresses drew over a six-month period (over 10,000 messages total), researchers concluded that 97 percent of spam was sent to addresses that were posted on public Web sites. They also found that organizations connected to popular portals such as Yahoo! and AOL received more spam. The study outlined a number of effective spam evasion techniques, including rendering addresses in HTML or human-readable format, such as replacing @ with "at."

Here is the full story from BBC.