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America Online Releases ‘Top 10 Spam’ List of 2003

Roster of Most Recognized Junk Emails Offers Online Consumers Valuable Tips to Fight Back Using ‘Custom Word List’ Blocking Tool

Company Also Announces It Blocked Total of 500,000,000,000 - a Half-Trillion - Spam Emails From Getting to Members in 2003

DULLES, VA - December 31, 2003 - Dubious education offers, pharmaceuticals, body enhancing hormones, and shady finance-related offers ranked as the most widely recognized junk email subject lines of 2003 by AOL ’spamwatchers’ protecting the service from spammers on behalf of its members.

The AOL Postmaster team in northern Virginia has calculated the Top 10 most widely sent spam email subject lines - or ‘headers’ - on the AOL service in 2003 after reviewing data forwarded by AOL members during the year, much of it collected in the aggregate via use of the popular ‘Report Spam’ button in AOL.

"We want to encourage AOL members and all online users to take this important data and use it to improve their online email experience," said Charles Stiles, Manager of the Postmaster Team within AOL’s Anti-Spam Operations group. "Taking this Top 10 list of most often-used subject lines in spam emails and placing them in AOL’s ‘Custom Word List’ is a great online New Year’s resolution to make - and it’s much easier to tackle than a lot of other resolutions people feel compelled to make in the offline world!"

"I’d also urge our members, as part of their online New Years resolution, to continue to be our allies in our ongoing fight against spam and spammers in 2004 by actively and regularly clicking on AOL’s popular ‘Report Spam’ button on their email inbox, to continually develop and add to their ‘Custom Word List’ in Spam Controls, and to check their ‘Spam Folder’ regularly to make sure their personal, adaptive spam filters are fine-tuned and customized for maximum effectiveness", Stiles added. Members can access the Spam Folder at AOL Keyword: Spam Folder, or by clicking the easily accessible "Spam Folder" link on their mailbox in AOL 9.0 Optimized.

Information about setting up and using a Custom Word List can be found at AOL Keyword: Spam Controls. The Custom Word List anti-spam feature is available for members using AOL software versions 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 8.0 Plus, and 9.0 Optimized.

Stiles offered up ‘expert tips’ for online consumers who are interested in improving their email experience by building a Custom Word List of terms that show up most often in the subject lines of junk emails. "First of all, when setting up any kind of anti-spam list, be as precise as possible and use your creativity to out-guess and out-smart spammers at their own game. That means setting up spam mail controls to block multiple variations of a particular word that you often see in spam subject lines. Second, look at the messages you report as spam, and make a list of the words used most often in those messages’ subject lines - then add those words to your Custom Word List within Spam Controls. You can start by using AOL’s own new Top 10 list for 2003. Third, when it comes to spam in your email inbox - report it, report it, report it! AOL can block spam better when our members report spam more often. Clicking on the ‘Report Spam’ button also trains our members’ adaptive spam filters and helps their AOL software ‘learn’ what members’ individual, personal email preferences are."

Stiles also outlined what made spam-fighting in 2003 unique at the grassroots level for the AOL Postmaster team: "There are many ways in which spammers were using techniques of fraud and falsification to attempt to get their junk email past AOL’s anti-spam filters. We continue to see lots of interesting patterns used by spammers, such as: ‘randomized characters’ in the email subject line; the use of word variations, including ‘whitespace’ insertions within words, to elude spam screens; misspellings of common spam terms; numeric substitutions for certain letters within common junk email words - such as a number ‘3′ for an ‘E’ and a number ‘1′ for an ‘I’, and a number ‘0′ for a ‘o’; and even the use of characters from the Cyrillic alphabet in email subject lines.

"At the same time, AOL announced it had blocked a total of almost 500 billion - or a half-trillion - spam emails from getting to the inboxes of its members during the 2003 calendar year. Using its advanced, finely-tuned spam-blocking filters, AOL estimates that by blocking this number of spam emails, it has detected and deleted prevented an average of 15,000 spam emails from getting into the inboxes of each AOL member. That amounts to an average of 40 less spam emails daily per AOL account.

The Company also reached a new high when it blocked 2.4 billion spam emails in a single day using its spam filters. During the 2003 year, AOL members also set a record for the amount of spam emails they reported to the Company in a single day at 20.4 million. AOL also reaffirmed that it routinely blocks 75%-80% of all Internet inbound email as spam, preventing it from reaching members’ email inboxes.

AOL’s ‘Top 10 Spam Email Subject Lines’ of 2003:*

1. Viagra online (also: xanax, valium, xenical, phentermine, soma, celebrex, valtrex, zyban, fioricet, adipex, etc.)
2. Online pharmacy (also: ‘online prescriptions’; ‘meds online’)
3. Get out of debt (also: ’special offer’)
4. Get bigger (also: ’satisfy your partner’; ‘improve your sex life’)
5. Online degree (also: ‘online diploma’)
6. Lowest mortgage rates (also: ‘lower your mortgage rates’; ‘refinance’; ‘refi’)
7. Lowest insurance rates (also: ‘lower your insurance now’)
8. Work from home (also: ‘be your own boss’)
9. Hot XXX action (also: ‘teens’; ‘porn’)
10. As seen on oprah

* - Source: AOL. This list is unscientific, and is not in any specific order. The cited email subject headers are not ranked by volume.

About America Online, Inc.

America Online, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of subsidiary of Time Warner Inc. Based in Dulles, Virginia, America Online is the world’s leader in interactive services, Web brands, Internet technologies and e-commerce services.

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