Hey Randy,

I am not sure if this is the right forum to ask this but in the past few days my FT only email account has been getting hit with dozens of x-rated spams a day. The title for each email is SEXUALLY EXPLICIT and then a random string of numbers/letters. Prior to that I never got any spam into this account.

The Spam filter is catching all of them, but I am wondering if something changed on your end to make this happen? I know one place I worked they did something to our email database and we went from having passive email addresses to active email addresses and subsequently started getting tons of spam emails a day.

Is this just luck of the draw here or maybe someone kindly signed me up for these emails (has happened before )

Thanks for your assistance.

Cheers,
MapleLeaf

Interesting ... there's absolutely nothing (zero, zilch) in my FT email account spam folder (and I do admit to also using the address for Bruce Schneier's security newsletter). Of course, mine is flyertalk domain ....

Maybe you're SPAM bait? (Just kidding). Somehow, someway, somebody got linked into your account and once it was known, in came the spam. I'd close it down for awile and let them get bouncebacks. Maybe that will help. Good luck. My FT account hasn't been violated; but the amount of crap on my Yahoo account is a real problem now.

Hey Randy,

From my personal knowledge, nothing has been changed here at the House of Miles either in my philosophy of safeguarding the email addresses of our users to adopting and keeping in place policies that are directed toward that effort. Now, while we no longer host the servers that FlyerTalk is hosted on, IB is very much aware of the policies and practices that I put in place long ago and have pledged to uphold that same policies. Given that they have many more Web site enterprises than just FlyerTalk, it would seem that any changes or security measures would have been felt far and wide and I can't find any evidence of this. As well, IB assures me that nothing has changed in the past few days and their own security and other practices back up the same privacy policies that have been in place for some time on FlyerTalk. As well, one might think if there was a change that it would have been felt far and wide and I'm not seeing anything here on FT other than the occasional problem that you are experiencing that could have several other explanations than FlyerTalk.

Whatever the situation i hope it goes away for you. I'm trying to think of anything we can help you with and if i miss anything, let me know.

And, thanks for your visit to the House of Miles the other day, I hope you felt welcomed and if ever the opportunity arrives again, the front door will be open.

Randy

Have you used your FT-only address to correspond with other FT members? If so then it's quite likely that your address got harvested from the machine of a fellow FTer who was unfortunate enough to get infected by a spam-harvesting virus.

I've noticed an increase in spam getting through the various spam filters in recent weeks to various of my email addresses, but not to my FT address. I suspect that some spammers have found a new way around the algorithms and it won't be long before the spam rules update.