KURIR. Kingston University Research & Innovation Reports. Mellor - Avoiding unwanted e-mail. Vol. 1, 2005. - 31 - ISSN Number: 1749-5652 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 Faculty of Computing, Information Systems & Mathematics Kingston University London KT1 2EE Keywords Spam, e-mail, marketing, HTML, JavaScript. Abstract 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 witho ut 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. Introduction. Clearly everyone who uses the Internet as a marketing channel has an interest in knowing how to avoid receiving time-consuming spam. Companies are realizing that spam takes up a large percentage of their contact resources, and are starting to incur both direct expenses by e.g. buying anti-spam software, or indirect expenses by removing customer-contact e-mail addresses from their web sites. This study investigates the roots of spam by looking at which e-mail addresses receive spam, using both a case study commercial web site as well as a contrived model web site. Bulk e-mailing is a marketing tool supposed to increase sales (Tomasula, 2002). The point of bulk mailing, and bulk e-mailing, is to offer a genuine and useful service to those who have asked for it and thus harvest customer gratitude and goodwill. Sending mail or e- mail to people who have not asked for it, who are not interested in the product and who have never heard of the producer, will probably result in the exact opposite. Despite this, many millions of e-mails are sent daily describing unwanted products to uninterested receivers, and this problem has been significant for