porn thru p-net e-mail

[Spinners' Wacky World of Tops]

anybody else get a invitation to enter a site?

[Jim]

Spinner,

This is an added benefit of performers.net membership!

Seriously...

If you have ever typed/posted your address ANYWHERE on the internet, there is a chance a pornbot "email harvester" has picked up your address and added it to a spam list. There is almost nothing you can do about it except, in the future, use an alternative (hotmail or yahoo) address whenever you sign up for things like forum membership or buy something with a credit card. I used to have a hotmail address I used specifically for the times I needed to type my email address into a form on the web. It is amazing how much spam came into that account... hundreds of messages every week. I used to just go in and delete everything once a month or so.

Lately, I just use my own email address and put up with the spam. I have pretty good filters on my mail server and my email program (Eudora) so the spam is down to 25 or so messages every day that get through. I just delete, delete, delete... It's pretty easy to spot spam in an inbox.

There are actually robots that go out on the web following links looking for snippets of text that match the criteria for an email address: john@blah.com and then they grab the text and save it for the spam servers. It's awful. (And John at "blah.com" is now going to get a lot of junk mail.) One way to avoid the robots is; whenever you need to post your address on a forum like this, you can type your address this way:

jim AT smirk DOT com

People will understand when they see it, but the robots just gloss over it because there's no @ symbol.

Forums like this are targets for email harvesting. But they can't get to the database of email addresses. They can only grab email addresses that are visible on the page or which are actual links. For example, if your email address is visible in your "signature" it's harvestable. But the email links (the little icons) above the body of each message are safer from the robots because they aren't linked to an actual email address, they're links to a CGI script (which then generates a page of HTML.)

Oh, and don't worry... I didn't sell (or give) your name to any spammers. Spam is just something you will have to learn to live with and manage if you plan on using the web.

Jim

[Kim]

Hi

There's a great (free) program called 'mailwasher' which goes off and looks at the mail on your server, then cross references it with a database of known spammers (and your own personal list of spammers) and then gives you the option to bounce, delete or collect your mail.

It's bloody good.
-Kim