Had it up to your cyberkiester with all that e-mail rot about getting rich quick, Nigerian money laundering, and fifty ways to love your lever? Suggestion, from the Center for Democracy and Technology: Act like the spammers. Sort of.
Change your name, use a lot of different identities, keep yourself out of sight, basically, is what the CDT suggests in a spam study, "Why Am I Getting All This Spam?" They spent six months baiting the spammers with a host of e-mail addresses in different Web spots "to glean some insight into where bulk e-mailers get their targets," as CNET.com described it.
The group also tinkered with a number of antispam techniques consumers could take up without problems, CNET continued, like translating e-mail addresses into plain English and opt-out options. But for all their potential value, these techniques and others CDT suggests won't erase the problem entirely. "Even a user who's really careful," CDT analyst Rob Courtney told CNET, "can still get spam."
