It is true.  I'm not trying to blame you guys for it though...you do a good
job with the amount of time you have and we cannot expect perfection.

For instance, if you search Google for "Brian LaFrance", the first two pages
that are listed contain the following peoples' email addresses:

Brian Cluff
Bob Renner
Brian LaFrance
Brian Casteel

Spammers have bots out there that are running through sites scraping off
exposed email addresses.  Granted, it is just a few of us that post to the
list, but those are the ones getting an increase in spam.  Go search for
your own email address and see.  If you search for brian@snaptek.com, it
comes back with 445 results...many are on azgeocaching.com.  A couple of
months ago, I setup an email address and put it at the bottom of a page that
is listed in Google.  The address was very awkward and should not be guessed
by accident.  It was not used anywhere else and within a month it was
receiving 10-15 pieces of junk email every day.

-Brian


-----Original Message-----
From: az-geocaching-admin@listserv.azgeocaching.com
[mailto:az-geocaching-admin@listserv.azgeocaching.com]On Behalf Of Brian
Cluff
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 9:37 AM
To: listserv@azgeocaching.com
Subject: Re: [Az-Geocaching] off topic e-mail question


Brian LaFrance wrote:
> I think there's been an increase in spam because someone probably figured
> out that most of our email addresses are exposed on AZGeocaching.com.

THATS SIMPLY NOT TRUE!!!  I We've gone out of our way to protect
everyone e-mail address as much as possible.  I protect everyone privacy
like I would protect my own.

The address list is NOT published on purpose to prevent privacy and SPAM
problems, and the archives have all the e-mail addresses removed from
the message, leaving just the person's name that posted it.  The ONLY 2
ways I can think of that would allow a spammer to get ahold of any
e-mail address' off this list would be to either subscribe to the list
itself, which would only get them a few e-mail addresses because the
vast majority of the people on this list never actually post anything.
That would end up being too much work for suck a low payout, so they
probably wouldn't do it.  The other way, and the more likely way, would
be to crawl through the archives and look for people that signed their
messages with an e-mail address.
I would recommend that if you want to sign messages with your e-mail
address, that you type it our like "person at service dot com".  That
has been found to be an effective way of stopping spam.

Brian Cluff
Team Snaptek


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