MySpace is preparing to release a full-fledged webmail product to its 125 million user community in the coming months. While most of those users are inactive or indifferent, MySpace email could be the perfect spammer’s paradise.

Since the advent of the Internet, people have learned to mask their email addresses whenever they post online. The penalty for posting your email address in clear view of Web crawlers is near certain targeting by some unscrupulous spammer.

When MySpace came along, it allowed people to find and communicate with anyone on the service fairly easily. This made it easier to communicate with your favorite band or your old friends from high school without having to give out your email address or phone number.

It didn’t take long for spammers to start using friend requests and messages to overflow the notifications of unsuspecting social networkers. Eventually it got to the point where the amount of noise coming from MySpace spammers drowned out the connection to your online friends.

Now the company is readying a webmail offering to tie users more closely to their MySpace accounts. Their goal is to integrate your online profile with your every day email usage by giving you an email address username @myspace.com.

Not only is this a very convenient way to email your friends on MySpace, it’s also a completely obvious and transparent addressing scheme that spammers will absolutely love. By crawling the site for just the simple username which is provided in the URL itself, anyone will be able to figure out your email address and start spamming.

Luckily for Fox Interactive employees, the company is migrating their email addresses to the @myspace-inc.com domain. Whether that’s to make room for the webmail or shield employee email addresses from being completely exposed through the service is still unknown.

Also unknown is whether anyone actually wants to have an email address tying them to the sophomoric social network for life. Any takers?

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Entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 9:46 am under Social Media, Spam.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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