Personal emailers please read.

Personal replies? To newsgroup postings? Where will it all end? [1]

I would like to enter a plea for forgiveness to Mozilla Thunderbird users. The program was fairly recently altered such that replying to News in the original way replies to the email address. I myself have done this unknowingly a couple of times and upset at least one poster. I "think" I have got into the correct habit now.

I've had that a few times now, but from a different group. I've just kill filed there's on (by email) and told them on the group what I've done and why.

In my newbie days of using newsgroups... I used my real email address when signing up to a newsgroup account.

Within days I was getting 100 spam emails every single day. Seems there are Newsgroup bots who harvest email addresses.

I ended up cancelling the email account and getting a new email account.

I then signed up to a new newsgroup account with the email address PLease.spam.me@I_love_spam.com

I never had any more spam emails after that..... I wonder why? :-)

Stephen.

I have been using usenet for at least 14 years, without disguising my email address. Yes, some spam comes through, but nothing that can't easily be dealt with.

Chris

During the SWEN episode, I received thousands of emails every few hours, rendering my then address totally useless. That's when I started using a fake address for Usenet.

One advantage of using google is that your email address is protected from the bots but still can be used.

But it can be seen by anyone not using Google. And I doubt if the bots use Google to harvest addresses.