Receiving spam depends on the occurrence of the e-mail address in Hyper Text and on the nature of the link to the file containing the e-mail address.

Receiving spam depends on the occurrence of the e-mail address in Hyper Text and on the nature of the link to the file containing the e-mail address. Robert B. Mellor Using a case study, spam levels were recorded for e-mail addresses embedded in the companies web site (HTML files) as "mailto" links, either with or without the address being shown in the Hyper Text. Spam was received at addresses not stated in the Hyper Text. However including the address in the Hyper Text resulted in approx. 17-fold more spam being received, including malicious (virus-containing) spam. Addresses on HTML files linked to using JavaScript did not receive spam. This led to the hypothesis that "ripper" software (software that extracts e-mail addresses from HTML files) can follow conventional HTML anchor tags, but cannot follow JavaScript links. This hypothesis was tested using a dummy web site before being confirmed on the case web site. spam, e-mail, marketing, HTML, JavaScript mellor2005b.pdf