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A COMMON CAUSE
If you read CyberNews on a regular basis, you may have noticed that unsolicited commercial electronic mail, better known as spam, is a topic that receives continuing attention.

Why all the coverage? With 31 billion e-mails zipping across the Internet and private networks every day, according to market researcher IDC, spam is the one electronic issue by which nearly every reader is affected.

In March, the Center for Democracy and Technology, or CDT, a nonprofit policy group specializing in digital communications, released the findings of a novel study on spam. For the study, the CDT made some 260 e-mail addresses available in different locations across the Internet and analyzed the more than 10,000 messages sent to the addresses over the course of six months.

Of those 10,000 messages received, nearly 9,000 were unsolicited commercial e-mails. A comparison of the number of messages sent to a particular address with how the address was posted online showed that putting your e-mail address on a publicly available Web site was by far the best way to guarantee you’ll receive plenty of spam. The more traffic such a site garners, the more spam you’ll get, the study found.

Second to public Web sites for generating spam was posting your address as part of a Usenet news-group submission, according to the CDT. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Usenet is a worldwide, distributed, electronic bulletin board organized by topic and driven by user submissions and responses.

Preventing your e-mail address from appearing in any public forum would seem an obvious way, then, to keep spam out of your inbox. But what if you need your address online for business purposes, want to participate in electronic discussion groups or simply don’t want to let the spammers run you off-line? The CDT offers some novel suggestions:

Disguise your address when posting it in a public place. The CDT found that writing out your address in "human-readable" form—"yourname at domain dot com" instead of "yourname{at}domain.com"—virtually eliminated spam. This technique confounds the e-mail address harvesting software with which spammers scour the Web but still allows people to contact you electronically.

Use "disposable" e-mail addresses for public postings. With the ubiquity of free, Web-based e-mail services, it’s easy to create an account, use it for a short period and then walk away when the spam becomes a bother. Another option is to sign up with a provider that can redirect messages sent to several addresses into one location—as addresses are discovered and exploited by spammers, they can be abandoned. To find a provider of this kind of service, type "disposable e-mail addresses" into your favorite search engine.

Exercise your privacy options when registering with Web sites. Despite what may be the common perception, the CDT found that most sites offering visitors a choice during registration about receiving commercial e-mail respected that choice. It pays to make your privacy decision during initial registration as the CDT found that visitors who opted out of commercial e-mail later were more likely to receive unwanted messages.

Reported by Joe Hoyle, electronic media editor, "hoylej{at}ada.org".

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