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Spam Research Six Month Report
Zoomer writes "Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited commercial e-mails (UCE), known popularly as 'spam.' Some users see spam as a minor annoyance, while others are so overwhelmed with spam that they are forced to switch e-mail addresses. This has led many Internet users to wonder: How did these people get my e-mail address? In the summer of 2002, CDT embarked on a project to attempt to determine the source of spam. To do so, we set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses, used them for a single purpose, and then waited six months to see what kind of mail those addresses were receiving. The results offer Internet users insights about what online behavior results in the most spam. The results also debunk some of the myths about spam." Update: 04/12 15:47 GMT by CN : About a minute after this went live, I found that michael posted this earlier. Mea culpa.
.... E-mail addresses composed of short names and initials like bob@ or tse@, or basic combinations like smithj@ or toms@ will probably receive more spam. E-mail addresses need not be incomprehensible, but a user with a common or short name may want to modify or add to it in some way in his or her e-mail address.
For further information, please contact Ari Schwartz at the Center for Democracy & Technology, 202-637-9800, ari@cdt.org.
Anybody see the irony in that?
They mentioned that no spam was received from emails listed in the WHOIS database...
I'd be interested in seeing a study for companies that harvest snail mail addresses from the database.
I've received junk snail mail from every shady company on the face of the planet when I register a new domain or when it's up for renewal...plus I've even received phone calls (back when I used a real phone) about "we're ready to setup your web hosting and web design. Call us back immediately!" Persistant bugger, too...he kept calling back.
It's interesting to see those results. While I knew that spammers
harvested e-mail addresses from Web Sites, I didn't realize the
magnitude of it.
of the 10,000 spam messages they received over the six month period,
8,609 of them were from simply posting it publicly to a web site. I
always opt out of the subscription services where I can, and most of
the time I avoid posting any of my e-mail addresses publicly, now I
will redouble that effort.
They had some really useful suggestions also, my favorite was using
multiple "disposable" e-mail addresses and forwarding them to a main
e-mail address that you keep private. When you sign up for a site,
create a new disposable e-mail address and use that. If you start
getting spam from it, just shut off that disposable e-mail. That is
incredibly good advice.
I like the idea of disguising or masking your e-mail address,
although I think using HTML characters or a "Human readable"
equivalent is something that spammers will easily be able to
circumvent if the practice becomes widespread. They don't bother now
because not many people do it.
What I would like to see is a standard practice of generating your
posted e-mail address into an image. This would make it
*significantly* more difficult to harvest e-mail addresses in mass,
while remaining easy for a single use of sending someone an e-mail message.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
No... that just means Hotmail receives a lot of spam. So many people use it that a reasonable proportion of possible usernames are taken, and that means spammers can and do use "dictionary" attacks, where they send e-mail to random usernames and then just hang onto the addresses that don't bounce.
I believe that big providers like Hotmail and Yahoo try reasonably hard to prevent people from sending spam from their accounts, as it uses up bandwidth and creates ill will, so they do things like limit number of recipients per message, or recipients per day, that sort of thing. (Can anyone confirm that?)
But a spammer can make their e-mails appear to come from whatever address they want, and if there's a URL in the message they don't need to worry about whether people can reply.
At Spamhaus they know. Not only does Spamhaus run the SBL, the most widely used blocklist of spam sources in existence, they also run ROKSO, the block-on-sight public database of notorious spam gangs. This database is used by many ISPs for background checks when signing up clients. It's also used by the FTC and state Attorney General offices.
According to Steve Linford, head of the Spamhaus team, 90% of the spam originating from America is sent by some 150 top spammers. If these were eliminated, our spam problem would virtually vanish overnight. This seems to contradict your suspicion that most spam is sent by suckers. In reality it's a small number of committed criminals that send most of it, and you can see all the publically available data on them at ROKSO. Go check it out - very educational indeed. So are many of Steve Linford's postings in news.admin.net-abuse.e-mail.