Get Out of Debt! AOL Releases Top Spam List
Fri January 2, 2004 12:27 PM ET
By Ben Berkowitz

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Viagra. Lowest mortgage rates. Hot XXX action. As seen on Oprah. Still reading? Seen this somewhere?

Those four phrases and six more topped the list of the most commonly-used subject lines for junk, or spam e-mail in 2003, Internet service provider AOL said on Wednesday.

Other top enticements, the Time Warner Inc. (TWX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) unit said, included online pharmacy, get bigger, online degree, lowest insurance rates, work from home and get out of debt.

Unsolicited commercial e-mail is considered a scourge of the Internet and, as governments rush to regulate or ban the sending of spam, private companies and service providers have also stepped up efforts to create filtering software that blocks such messages.

During calendar 2003, AOL blocked nearly 500 billion spam messages from reaching user inboxes, an average of 40 fewer such messages per day per subscriber account. The company said it regularly blocks 75 percent to 80 percent of incoming mail as spam.

The manager of AOL's postmaster team, which oversees e-mail, said new laws and regulations had made spam more complex by knocking amateurs out of the business.

I don't know that they're really getting smarter, but I think we're really sorting out the wheat from the chaff, Charles Stiles told Reuters.

Fighting spam is also a more difficult problem than it used to be, Stiles said, as professional spammers take to using tricks like spelling words slightly wrong, replacing letters with numbers and adding spaces in the middle of words in order to fool filters.

I think the biggest challenge is getting to the die-hard spammers, Stiles said. They will break the law, they will abuse other peoples computers, they will steal network space.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.
Source: Reuters