Technology Gains in Spam Fight, FTC Study Finds

"Spammers continue to harvest e-mail addresses from public areas of the Internet, but Internet service providers are using anti-spam technology to block the vast majority of spam sent to those addresses, the Federal Trade Commission said yesterday. The FTC studied three aspects of spam: address harvesting, the effectiveness of spam filtering by ISPs and the effectiveness of using "masked" e-mail addresses as a way to prevent the harvesting of addresses. To conduct the study, FTC staff members created 150 new undercover e-mail accounts, 50 at an ISP that uses no anti-spam filters and 50 each at two ISPs that use spam filters. They then posted the addresses on 50 Internet sites including message boards, blogs, chat rooms and USENET groups where spammers might go to harvest the addresses." Source: dmnews.com