How widespread is the practice of sending unsolicited commercial e-mail?
It got so bad several months that a whole new Usenet newsgroup was set up just for that one topic: news.admin.net-abuse.email (for all topics about abuse using e-mail, but virtually all traffic on the newsgroup, is in regard to UCE). Since then, the volume of UCE has increased threefold. To avoid advertisers who indiscriminately collect e-mail addresses from Usenet articles, a large number of people have found it necessary to use deliberately obscured e-mail addresses when posting. For example, a person whose address is actually joe@easynet.com might post using the address joe@easynet.NO.COMMERCIAL.EMAIL.com (this example is hypothetical to illustrate the method; see the newsgroup for many actual examples). Anyone collecting that address into a commercial advertising list would have to manually edit it to remove the middle part, and most advertisers don’t bother to do that. They prefer to run software that automatically collects a million addresses, and then mass-mail to all those addr
