Recently put email on post for fuel calculator

I had my name down for the same calculator (if it was via this forum) and have not received a post. But I do manage to get about 5 or 6 similar letters each week, usually from Nigeria.

They are able to get your email from a million different places. I do a couple of web pages for a few people and have my email there, so it is reasonable to assume they could be picked up from there.

Just ignore them.

Jack

Any site that you place your email address in clear text (ie: type it in) is likley to end up giving the address away to the hundreds of email spiders (site crawlers that look for email addresses) that run over the internet daily.

This is the reason that we do not every publish your addresses in any of the open areas of this site. If you want to type your address in somewhere use the at and dot syntax that seems to be a sort of defacto standard i.e: david at itbeyond dot com dot au. NOTE: That I have heard of a system that also can extract from the at dot method. No matter what we do to try to stay ahead you can be sure the crawler creators will be following very closely.

This is also another reason that we created the members message function to eliminate that requirements for members to write their email addresses on the system. The reason that the members message function is not available to non members is that we have also seen many instances where the Nigerian's and heaps of other will bother to register a visitor profile and interact with the system to send the spam. We know for sure that they will not become members and hence this is how that feature has been setup.

I hope this helps .

BTW: We get around 20 $45M offers per day in our email system. Plus around 10 spams per hour in Michelle's mail box, 8 spams per hour in ExplorOz and around 4 in my email box every dam hour. Ah what to do, install a spam stopper (as we have in the past) and then lose a few real important emails - cannot win but hit the DELETE key.

Hi Everyone --

Try using a program like MailWasher which lets you view your emails at the ISP before you download onto your computer.

Also allows you to set up various filters and you can also "bounce back" unwanted emails which will register with the sender as "postmaster" return advising a dead address.

It's available off the web as a free download with all bells and whistles for 30-days. Can still be used after that with a few functions removed. Full version was around $30 if I remember correctly. I wouldn't be without it.

Full version of IncrediMail also provided greater protection than Microsoft.

Bernard

There is a ton of info on this site about email/net security
link text

If you do have to publish your adderss put an extra bit on the end, for example
me@here.cm.au(no spam)

Not sure how effective it is, but it is meant to work.
cheers
Pete

Thanks everyone above for your help and I'll follow some of your advice.

Snatchem

my son, computer engineer has some highly illegal software that he uses from time to time to stop persistent spammers. It replies to the spam email & formats the hard drive of the offending party... very effective... but not legal