Comprehensive study on SPAM and how to protect yourself from it
I hate spam. Since I'm the only person @ sliver.com, I get loads of it. I've finally found an email filter (
www.cloudmark.com) that filters almost all of it, but I still must sift through its hits checking for false positives, as no filter is perfect. What a pain.
Anyway, this study is a must-read for anyone with an email address (that's you), as it discusses a six month study primarily covering _how_ spammers get your address(es) and how you can prevent that from happening. In short, the vast majority of spammers get your email from crawling the web[1] and there is a pretty simple way to prevent that from happening that resulted in _zero_ spams. Not bad considering they got over 10,000 spams over their test period.
http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml
[1] They put their email addresses in normal, human-readable ("jeff.key at sliver.com"), and machine-readable (html-encoded, ie. &xxx;) on web sites, in NNTP newsgroups, in the WHOIS database, and many other places.