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Feb 28, 2004 | 04:18 PM

GotLift

Thread Starter

Elder User

Joined: Feb 2004

Posts: 717

Likes: 0

Junk Mail

I never received junk mail in my primary account until I registered with this site. I thought that my e-mail address was protected. I know it wasn't "leaked" by a board member because I have never been contacted by e-mail by anyone here. Has anyone else experienced this?

Feb 28, 2004 | 04:31 PM

Mil1ion

New User

Joined: Jan 2008

Posts: 0

Likes: 24

Your e-mail address is Secure on FTE.

The only time a harvester could get it is if you had it shown on the site before Ken initiated the FTE only e-mail system.

I know someone who ticked off a guy and the result was someone was using his e-mail address for their fun.

Feb 28, 2004 | 05:12 PM

GotLift

Thread Starter

Elder User

Joined: Feb 2004

Posts: 717

Likes: 0

Thanks Mil1ion. I can't understand it. I only registered a few weeks ago and it started immediately. I suppose there are other ways for the address to get out but I don't know how. I am usually very discreet with this address and this is the first time I have used it on an internet site.

Thanks though...

Feb 28, 2004 | 05:22 PM

FordFadgeole

Postmaster

Joined: Dec 2003

Posts: 2,736

Likes: 1

From: The County

I'v never recieved anything except e-mails from sites I subscribe to.My security settings are medium for for this site and somewhere between and medium and high for other sites.You may be getting cookies from sites you have visited.This site seems quite secure.

Feb 28, 2004 | 07:47 PM

FTE Ken

Post Fiend

Joined: Jan 1997

Posts: 23,165

Likes: 18

From: Enjoying the real world.

This site has never sold, loaned or rented its email database and never will. We've made a couple announcement emails to the entire forum database 2, maybe 3 times, in the last 4 years. You can opt out of that but those emails are usually system oriented messages you want to get such as the message we sent to everyone when we changed forum software.

These days you don't have to post your email anywhere for it to get out. Send email to someone who has a virus that "spoofs" return addresses (in other words, uses email addresses from people in the email software address book) and your address is now available to the world.

Even worse.... reply to a spam with a remove request. You've just confirmed to them that your address is valid and you're going to get even more spam. Plus there are dictionary spammers. They connect to a system such as AOL and attempt to send an email to every word in the dictionary and every common user id (for example, bobs @ someisp.com).

Feb 28, 2004 | 10:12 PM

GotLift

Thread Starter

Elder User

Joined: Feb 2004

Posts: 717

Likes: 0

Thanks for the information. That is scary. I hate to say that we need more laws but this should definitly be addressed. Of course, fuzzy borders would make it impossible to enforce any law.

Feb 28, 2004 | 10:21 PM

FTE Ken

Post Fiend

Joined: Jan 1997

Posts: 23,165

Likes: 18

From: Enjoying the real world.

It's gotten very bad. FTE's server has a ton of measures in place to stop spam:

1. Each mail another server attempts to deliver to an FTE address is checked against several "spammer" databases available on the Internet and rejected if it fails.
2. Each mailer's server address must be a valid server on the Internet (called a reverse lookup).
3. Mail from several "spam heavy" countries (such as Russia, Singapore, etc. are rejected, good or bad (maybe 1 in 10,000 are actually good so its worth losing the occasional valid email).
4. Mail headers are examined for possible clues as spam and rejected if they match.

With these measures, about 500-700 emails per day to the FTE server are rejected. Even so, Club FTE users and I still get spam.

On my computer I use Eudora which has Junk mail filtering built in (it gets smarter as I flag more email as junk). My junk filters catches about 500 spam emails per week and about 50 get through.