The Federal Trade Commission published a report on e-mail harvesting. Investigators seeded 175 different locations with 250 new e-mail addresses to see what would happen. Over 3,000 spam messages were received during the first six weeks. The investigators found:<ul>
<li>“86 percent of the addresses posted to web pages received spam. It didn’t matter where the addresses were posted on the page: if the address had the “@” sign in it, it drew spam.”</li>
<li>“86 percent of the addresses posted to newsgroups received spam.”</li></ul>Based on the findings in this report, my trick of masking e-mail addresses on my web sites should definitely help prevent future harvesting of my addresses.
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