Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report

1. E-mail addresses harvested from the public Web are frequently used by spammers.
2. The amount of spam received by an address posted on the public Web is directly related to the amount of traffic that Web site receives.
3. E-mail addresses harvested from the public Web appear to have a relatively short "shelf life."
4. Addresses posted in the headers of USENET messages can receive significant spam, though less than a posting on the public Web.
5. Obscuring an e-mail address is an effective way to avoid spam from harvesters on the Web or on USENET newsgroups.
6. Sites that publish their policies and make choice available to users generally respected those policies.
7. Domain name registration does not seem to be a major source of spam.
8. Even when an e-mail address has not been posted or shared in any way, it is still possible to receive spam through various "attacks" on a mail server.