In the past few years I can think of only 2 spam emails that seemed to be related to being harvested off FT.

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~ Glen ~

Come visit HERE the most ** FRIENDLY FORUM ** on FlyerTalk. No flame wars, no personal abuse, no substance abuse. Not much of anything really!

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

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

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