Spam Risks Identified

In an effort to determine what online activities place consumers at risk for receiving spam, a task force of federal and state investigators "seeded" 175 different locations on the Internet with 250 new, undercover e-mail addresses and monitored the addresses for six weeks. The sites included chat rooms, newsgroups, Web pages, free personal Web-page services, message boards and e-mail service directories.

One hundred percent of the e-mail addresses posted in chat rooms received spam; the first received spam only eight minutes after the address was posted. Eighty-six percent of the e-mail addresses posted at newsgroups and Web pages received spam; as did 50 percent of addresses at free personal Web page services; 27 percent from message board postings; and nine percent of e-mail service directories.

Investigators also found that the type of spam received was not related to the sites where the e-mail addresses were posted. For example, e-mail addresses posted to children's newsgroups received a large amount of adult content and work-at-home spam.

Help For Consumers

• Consider "masking" your e-mail address. "johndoe@myisp.com" could be masked as "johndoe@spamaway.myisp.com."
• Use a separate screen name for online chatting.
• Set up disposable e-mail addresses for discrete projects.
• Use two e-mail accounts - one for public posting, one for personal messages.
• Use a unique e-mail address, containing both letters and numbers.

Additional tips are suggested in the FTC's publication, "E-mail Address Harvesting: How Spammers Reap What You Sow," available online at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/spamalrt.htm.

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