As spammers get evermore inventive, companies have desparately searched for a way to legitimise they e-mailing lists. One such method has emerged and seems to be being adapted as a standard.

The brainchild of Habeas, it seeks to validate email by use of copyright. Unfortunately the copyright had to be small enough to fit into an email header - that's where the Haiku comes in. Each "Habeas Compliant Message" contains a small copyright that basically tells ISPs that the email is not spam.

The headers look like this:
X-Habeas-SWE-1: winter into spring
X-Habeas-SWE-2: brightly anticipated
X-Habeas-SWE-3: like Habeas SWE (tm)
X-Habeas-SWE-4: Copyright 2002 Habeas (tm)
X-Habeas-SWE-5: Sender Warranted Email (SWE) (tm). The sender of this
X-Habeas-SWE-6: email in exchange for a license for this Habeas
X-Habeas-SWE-7: warrant mark warrants that this is a Habeas Compliant
X-Habeas-SWE-8: Message (HCM) and not spam. Please report use of this
X-Habeas-SWE-9: mark in spam to .

Companies are signing up to this as fast as they can, in a bid to legitimise their mailers.

Although on the whole this is a good thing, it means you now need to be particularly careful about validating your email adddress by clicking links to confirm, as once you have, you are effectively saying it's OK for the company to email you.

Afterall, you get enough junk in your inbox already, do you really want to be added into every company's periodicals as well?