#Online email obfuscator rot13 update#

I expected “viagra” to be one of the top words, but I guess they are not using it in subject lines to bypass spam filters. The most used words, as seen, are “free”, “credit”, “score”, “home” etc. This is a simple cloud of the words spammer use the most in their email subject lines. So, here are the results we got after one year of waiting and after posting email addresses to numerous different types of websites and online services. We tried to cover as much ground as possible, and collect as much data as possible to back us up. They usually just cover social network spam, or sites selling email lists. Secondly, most other (newer) studies are not as comprehensive as this one is. The Internet space moves so fast, that to be ahead of spammers and scammers, you have to find out how they operate - and how they operate changes all the time.

Now, there have been many such studies in the past (see Related work below), so how is this study different from the others? For one, this is new, raw data we collected. To make a medical analogy, there is treating the illness after it’s already happened, and there is learning more about the root cause of the illness so it can be prevented completely. We were looking at the root of the problem - how spammers get your email addresses in the first place. We were super lucky to be funded early on and I worked on this for about a year. I was super excited to get started with this research project. I instantly related to this research since I have been at the receiving (and sadly, sending) side of spam emails, and I understand what a spam email really costs – nothing to the sender, a lot to the receiver. Everyone has had the problem where an important email fell into the spam folder.īack in August 2012, I stumbled upon this amazing research opportunity presented by the Information School at the UW – to be a part of the research to find out how spammers harvest peoples’ email addresses, and how it can be prevented. 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. It’s amazing just to think about how much energy and money these companies would save if there was no spam.īut it’s not just the companies that suffer losses from email 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. Companies all across the world, irrespective of their market, location or size, incur loss of resources, human power and money due to spam. As spammers get more sophisticated, it becomes difficult for anyone to differentiate spam emails from genuine emails. Spam is not just unsolicited, unapproved contact by a stranger sometimes spam can lead to loss of money and even theft of identity.

#Online email obfuscator rot13 update#

This is an update on the research I did under the guidance of Jeff Huang (now assistant professor at Brown University) titled How do spammers harvest your e-mail address?.Īs 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.