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.

There is plenty in between that, and an email alias will do exactly that (unless one is an FT moderator, but then they have access to your IP address anyway and can track you down from that).

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.

Which is why an email alias system is being proposed. Only FT admins would have access to my real email address (which they now do anyway, even if I choose to suppress it publicly), us minions would only have [email protected].

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.

I never said that spam would NOT be an issue. What I SAID was that spam would not be increased by it, since instead of harvesting the email address I now have in my profile, they would harvext the alias. Spam would be neither increased or decreased.

As far as spam goes, I don't have quite your problem - I only have to delete about 160 per day (or that is what MailWasher tells me), so only about 5000 per month.

Dave