About This Project

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

As an experienced ex-blogger and an avid internet marketer, I can firmly say that every Internet user with an email address has received spam email more than just once. Spam is not just unsolicited, unapproved contact by a stranger; sometimes spam can lead to loss of money and even theft of identity. As spammers get more sophisticated, it becomes difficult for anyone to differentiate spam emails from genuine emails. Companies all across the world, irrespective of their market, location or size, incur loss of resources, human power and money due to spam. Tech companies, like Google and Yahoo, use about 30 billion watts of electricity (1) - that's enough electricity to power 3 million houses for a year. It's amazing just to think about how much energy and money these companies would save if there was no spam.

What is the significance of this project?

Why does this research matter to me? Good question. I hate spam. But it's not just the companies that suffer losses from email spam. People like you and me are spending a lot of time reviewing spam, and even with strong spam filters they still have to check their spam folder for misclassified email. Everyone has had the problem where an important email fell into the spam folder.

What are the goals of the project?

Our final product will be a paper describing the results of the study. In this experiment, we will post email addresses to the Web - blogs, websites, newsgroups, social networking sites, forums, web services, whois databases, chatrooms, mailing lists, and microblogging sites (twitter, tumblr) to identify which emails are harvested. We'll also submit email addresses for e-greeting cards, insurance quotes, free ipad sites, etc. We plan to investigate multiple forms of obscuring the email (via image, using [at], html escaping, javascript, etc.) to see which methods work best for preventing spammers from harvesting your email.