<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by thadocta:
ScottC, I think you are out of step here - some people on this board - I can think of at least three on the QF forum - have contacts within QF, and wish to remain anonymous, yet they also wish to be contactable.
By going down the email alias road, ALL FlyerTalkers could be accessible whilst still remaining anonymous.
I do not think the spam issue is a problem, since if spam-bots get hold of [email protected] (in my case) and start sending it spam, then the spam will be redirected to my real email address - so
I think that this is a red herring.
But I think that some people on this list desire both anonymity AND accessibility, and having to go through the rigamarole of setting up a Yahoo! or Hotmail address (last time I did it - 3 weeks ago - took about 10 mins each time) is a PITA.
Dave</font>
I'm not out of step at all, it's a decision all people will sadly have to make, either publish your address and face what (sadly) is happening or not publish it and stay anonymous. There isn't anything in between that. The things that have happened here in the past week prove that. A hotmail address used only on FT is a way of preventing anyone linking your identity to your posts. Don't forget that Google knows everything.
It's simply not possible to stay anonymous AND post a contact email address that you use for many other things, if someone means you harm they WILL manage to track you down.
As for spam, the posts in the "only Randy" board make it painfully obvious that spam IS a serious problem, I have had my FT only address here for over a year and delete over 7000 spam messages a month from my server.
Several FT members (myself included) are considering setting up a free email forwarding service, more about that here:
http://www.flyertalk.com/travel/fttr...ML/011406.html