A few weeks ago, I changed my FlyerTalk email address. I did not disseminate this new address to anyone else at all. All friends/family/associates still use my old email address. The only place the new one appeared was at FlyerTalk.

I haven't gotten a lot of Spam, but in the last 2 weeks, I have gotten:

3 offers to lower my mortgage
5 offers to see (fill in the blank here) in her glorious nudity.
2 offers to see "barely legal girls" in all kinds of truly sick situations
1 offer to refinance my car...(BTW, my car happens to be paid for...like, DIH! [Which is DUH, but with less intelligence driving it])

Anyway, not like the 75+ Spams a week I get with my years-old email of hnechetsky, but I thought it might be enlightening to all of you.

I do not intend this as a shot at FlyerTalk, they certainly have nothing to do with this, but I do have a couple of questions:

1. Have any of you noticed this "mining" of your email;
2. Anyone have any suggestions as to how we can keep these trashy no-goods out of here?

You know, we can't just email them and say, "Stop." I tried that, and got the standard answer, "Anyone can start and (AOL/HotMail/etc.) account and there's nothing we can do about it.

Is there any way we can start making these worthless no-goods have accountability here?

Well I did note a substantial rise in spam I'd received just after posting an email on FT and have long suspected this to be the case- yet no cause-effect relationship was observed to be proven!

My ears are open!

Just like the email box!

I've gotten spam in some accounts that I don't even use! The spammers may be methodically trying every single name in an account (seen some of these lists in alphabetical order).

If you are so inclined, go to spamcop.net and work towards shutting them down.

In the last +/- two weeks I've seen a huge increase of spam-mail in my account.

I never thought it could come from FT, but you never know.

Fight the SPAM! http://spamcop.net/

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For money savings ideas & tips check & FF miles bonus for finance & auto buying check out ValueConsumer.com

[This message has been edited by DH (edited 10-17-2000).]

Yep. FT is responsible for all sorts of spam. Really annoys me that the same company keeps changing the email address of the spam for every email so that you can not block it.

But the question is "Is FT selling the email addresses or is someone just getting them off the board without FT consent?"

It's unlikely that FT is selling our emails. More likely, the spammers are using a spider to collect all the emails it can from bulletin boards all over the web - it is relatively easy for a software program to do that - and then that spider-generated list is rapidly sold.

Never reply to unsolicited spam - even to unsubscribe - that will confirm your email is a working address - lists of confirmed email addresses cost a lot more and get distributed to other spammers quickly.

I have also noticed the sudden increase in SPAM over the last couple of weeks. One of the common techniques used in newsgroups is to add some extraneous characters such as "NOSPAM" to your email address. In theory, an automated process would not notice this but a non-automated human (hopefully) would.

However, Some of these "spiders" may actually be smart enough to strip some of this stuff back out. I even remember one imaginative fellow who changed his address to [email protected] and then added to his SIG the instruction to "drop YOURPANTS" when emailing him. I am sure people noticed it and I would imagine he got very little SPAM

Many of these are hotmail accounts. I have not received any increase in spam. A friend of mine who recently opened a hotmail account (not listed in FT) also told me a couple of days ago that he got a lot of spam. Coincidence - maybe, maybe not.

Hi all!

I'd be inclined to believe that some of the spam I get comes from having listed my E-Mail address on FT. I've been using all kinds of "inbox protectors" and other such tools, but they haven't been too effective recently. I still think it's worth posting stuff on FT, despite the spam :-)

YeZZaph

As I have a middle eastern heritage and a ethically proper yahoo account name. I am constantly bombarded with emails for people looking for certain strings in names. Argh.
Just came home to a credit card scam today. At least its not nasty jokes and images that people who think I'm another lala in their lives.

argh.

i think I'm going to change my yahoo account to something biological, amphipoda71 and see what comes of it.

sigh.

no problems with ft though.

Yes I have noticed a lot of SPAM to my FT address.

That said, I've started to get SPAM in my personal account that I've never given to anyone but friends. I can tell that in this case there's a program that's sending email to virutally every possible variation of an email address.

My guess is that there is definite email mining going on here.

Perhaps I'll remove my email from FT since no one ever emails me from FT anyway.

My [email protected] that is my FlyerTalk email address never gets any spam. I have no filters or anything. Oddly, one of my other aol screen names (that I never use except for file storage space, gets tons of spam. I certainly can't figure it out.

My vote is a savage beating for spammers. It's probably difficult to spam when your fingers don't work!



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Time..... is on my side.

I too have noticed a distinct rise in the number of spam e-mails (mostly stuff to do with CC and e-commerce) I have been getting in the last two weeks but they are not from my FT e-mail but one I use only on Ebay (not a hotmail or yahoo account).