Anti-Spam Measures

It was brought to my attention by one submitter that (s)he had gotten mail from romo11@theglobe.com">"Gayle Wilson" <promo11@theglobe.com> evidently falsly claiming that (s)he had requested a ranking of this site.

I had promised not to sell your personal data (e-mail) addresses to spammers, and I have kept that promise.  However, some spammers scour the net for e-mail addresses, and it's hard to avoid them.

Click "Read More" below to find out further measures I've taken, and what you can do to help.First of all, I've done one thing to try to help prevent this from happening in the future.  That is, those of you who have a real e-mail address set in your "fake e-mail address" in your user preferences, I've changed the "@" to " at ".  That means that people cannot simply click (or gather) the link to you to send a message off - some hand editing is required.  It's only a matter of time before spammers figure this out and start gathering e-mail addresses like this with automated correction, but this should help keep most spammers at bay.

Other techniques you might want to consider are:

• "me_no_spam@mydomain.org" for me@mydomain.org - most people understand to remove the "_no_spam" part, but you may include an explaination with it in the fake e-mail field.


• "me at not mydomain org" for me@mydomain.org - essentially a combination of the above item with what I've done with your fake e-mail addresses.


• "me@domain.farm - substitute org for farm" - this one is a bit trickier, so I included the instructions with the fake e-mail address.
  

Furthermore, when you write a submission, don't include your real e-mail address.  Write a fake one like the above if you really want e-mail feedback, otherwise leave the field blank and just read the replies here.  As somebody who's e-mail address has been on the Web since 1995, I can tell you that you're better off not publishing it unless you have control over mail filters (which I do now - which is probably why I didn't get such spam).

In the mean time, I'm currently trying to get a hold of these people to have them confirm or deny that a request had been sent to them, and if one had (which I doubt), I want to contact the requestee.  If I do not get a response soon, I will submit this spammer to The U.S. Federal Trade Commission who is interested in keeping track of this sort of thing.

But before I send anything to the USFTC, I'd like to know if others had been harrassed with this e-mail, or any others that you think may have been from spammers gathering e-mail addresses from this site.  If so, I'd like you to send the entire message (I need headers that don't get forwarded with the forward button) by dragging and dropping the message into a new mail window - so that the message is an attachment.  (I know Netscape Mail can do that - I don't know about Outlook, personally.)  Please send said messages to:

theglobecomas@netscape.net

This is a special account I set up for handling "theglobe.com Anti-Spam" information.

I regret that it has had to come to this.  But I made a promise to you to not give out e-mail addresses, and I'm going to work as hard as I can to prevent spammers from harassing you from this site.

Further information about anti-spam methods can be found at SueSpammers.org.