Monday, November 16 12:01 EST

Yahoo Spam Sponges to Reduce Spam

Sunnyvale, CA – Yahoo engineers unveiled 'spam sponges,' the latest in several innovative measures they have taken to combat unsolicited commercial e-mail messages or spam.

The spam sponge attracts another unwanted can.

The sponges take the form of bogus e-mail accounts that have been deliberately set up to look like real ones. "We use an automated name generator to seek for possible account names that do not yet exist and we create an account in that name," explained Yahoo Engineer Ted Huffner. "Then automated bots subscribe these fictitious accounts to as many mailing lists as they can find."

"Behind me you can see huge banks of servers," said Huffner, "each one hosting millions of randomly created e-mail accounts, soaking up the spam that would otherwise clutter in your inbox."

"It's just a simple numbers game," said Yahoo CEO Geoff Wyatt. "With spammers bombarding us with over 100 million unwanted messages every day, if you can cause half of those to land in bogus accounts, then you automatically halve the number of spam messages received by real people."

Kathleen Gipson of Enhance Your Rod, Inc. called the move “deceptive and harmful. We want our message about member enlargement to get to the people that want it, not some random e-mail account without a person associated with it.”

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