|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 09/03
Foreign Policy
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 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. This graph 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.
E-mail was used to register a domain name: 1 message |
 |
|
E-mail was used on a Web-based discussion board: 15 messages |
||
E-mail was sold or shared commercially without owner's permission: 25 messages |
||
E-mail was used for commercial purposes, and owner asked not to receive spam: 85 messages |