Re: Too much spam! (medit?)

Here is some information on spam that may be useful.

Your email address is "harvested" whenever it appears in a public 
place.  These might be
-- bulletin boards of any kind, whether usenet news groups, or 
bulletin board that appear on various web sites
-- public groups such as those sponsored by Yahoo!, Topica, 
SmartGroups or others where membership is open to the public and the 
membership list is available to anyone (some groups sponsored by such 
groups are private -- always inquire before joining a group -- 
personally I will not join any public ones.)
-- some less-then-stellar providers of email accounts (I understand 
hotmail is one of the worst) who let their lists be obtained for a 
fee, or don't protect them with sufficient security measures
-- if you sign up to be on the distribution list for a particular 
product and that group sells their address list to others (similarly 
to how ordering from one mail order catalog causes our print mail box 
to become flooded with catalogs from similar companies).

A private list this one is not going to cause you to receive any 
spam.  I also know that Yahoo! mail doesn't generate spam because I 
have a second email address with them and have not received any spam 
on that account in way over a year.

Here are some things you can do:

--if you want to post to a bulletin board or join an public 
membership discussion list sponsored by someone like Yahoo! -- get a 
second email account just for that purpose. If it generates spam, you 
can simply go into the maibox once in a while and delete it all.  For 
personal, business, and every day correspondence use a separate email 
address from a separate vendor and never use it anywhere publicly.

--if you must register any product or any service or in any way sign 
up for anything, be very careful to read all the options.  Many 
require you to put a check mark in a box to "opt out" of getting on 
their distribution list (which may be sold).

--Some Internet Services Providers will spam-protect your account at 
their server level for a small additional fee -- usually about $1 or 
$1.50 per month. And as several have said, many software programs let 
you put filters in place.

Remember, too, that the circulation of lists is exploding at a level 
we can't even fathom (much like weeds springing up in our garden.) 
You may have logged onto a usenet group once years ago and that 
address has been sold and resold. Where maybe you got one or two 
pieces of spam per week because of that initial harvest of your 
address, it now may generate hundreds of spam messages per week.

The problem is really horrible. The San Jose Mercury News devoted a 
whole section to this topic last week.  There is little to be done by 
any of us right now except filter and delete.  Also, never reply to 
any message that says click here to be taken off the list -- all that 
does is let them know that the address is real.

Carol
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