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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/thespamreport/0,39025001,39117577,00.htm

Oprah's XXX sex drug finance scam revealed
Spam's big hitters laid bare...

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Published: Friday 02 January 2004

Viagra, Lowest mortgage rates, Hot XXX action, As seen on Oprah. If these look familiar to you then you're not alone - they are the most common phrases to appear in spam emails.

Those four phrases and six more topped the list of the most commonly used subject lines for unsolicited email in 2003, according to AOL.

Other top enticements, the Time Warner unit said, included "online pharmacy", "get bigger," "online degree", "lowest insurance rates", "work from home" and "get out of debt".

Unsolicited commercial email is considered a scourge of the internet and, as governments rush to regulate or ban the sending of spam, private companies and service providers have also stepped up efforts to create filtering software that blocks such messages.

Fighting spam is a more difficult problem than it used to be, said Charles Stiles, manager of AOL's postmaster team, which oversees email. Professional spammers have taken to using tricks like spelling words slightly wrong, replacing letters with numbers and adding spaces in the middle of words in order to fool filters.

"I think the biggest challenge is getting to the die-hard spammers," Stiles said. "They will break the law, they will abuse other people's computers, they will steal network space."