Howdy all-
I thought I would chime in here. I'm not sure why you would receive
spam, but it wouldn't have come from the ptcuser.org site. Our lists
are confidential and we don't sell, rent or otherwise distribute e-mail
addresses. Unless someone happened to break into our system, it
wouldn't be possible to get it from our server.
However, once you do post, your mail goes out to potentially thousands
of other people, all receiving your e-mail address. Depending on what
happens there, it is very possible that a spambot is out there
harvesting your address. Don't forget also that anyone who gets a
virus these days could inadvertently send your e-mail address to places
you don't expect. How many of you have seen your e-mail address
"spoofed" by a virus that someone else sent when there system got
infected? I've had that happen many times, in fact, everytime there is
a new major infection on the 'net.
I've looked at some alternatives such as a bulletin board system as
opposed to an exploder, but that would cut off a lot of folks that
don't have web access at work. (Some bulletin board let you read
messages via e-mail but I haven't seen one that lets you post messages
via e-mail to a bulletin board.) The other alternative would be to
anonymize all contributions (strip the e-mail address) but that would
mean you could not get direct replies from respondents, and that every
reply to a posting would have to necessarily go to the entire list. A
lot of people don't like that since the "netiquette" is to have the
originator post a summary of all responses instead of getting 10-15
responses on the exploder.
A while back, I stripped out all of the e-mail addresses wherever I
found them in the old archives...these are the files going back several
years on the exploder. That should have stopped any potential
harvesting from that source. The new system requires a login to access
the e-mail lists...this is normally beyond the capabilities of the
address harvesting software out there so it should prevent problems
there.
My own address probably receives the most circulation due to the number
of posts I make, but I don't believe most of the spam I get is from the
list. I don't know how but I have other e-mail addresses (non
work-related) that have never been used with this list or any other,
and somehow the address still ended up on a spammer list. Go figure.
The best solution is to have a good spam filter on your e-mail client,
preferably something that puts all filtered messages into a folder you
can access to periodically check for e-mail that was improperly flagged
as junk. Some corporate spam filters are way too aggressive that they
throw out the baby with the bath water and you end up losing a lot of
important mail (and they don't bother to tell you that the mail was
bounced or deleted either).
Regards,
Rick
==
Rick Snider
Executive Director, PTC/USER
