Avoiding Spam

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Online Greeting Cards, News Stories, and Photo Albums
What do these have in common?

  • They are web sites where you type in someone else’s e-mail address so the site can tell them to come and look at something.
  • Most of these sites do not do it out of the goodness of their hearts. They are in the money making business and they collect and sell e-mail addresses.

    • Beyond that, robotic web-crawlers called spiders, crawl throughout the web, finding e-mail addresses on such sites and filing them in lists to sell. When you type an e-mail address into a web site, it becomes available to those spiders.

    Buyers of these e-mail addresses sell them to anyone. They distribute anything they can with them. One of the pre-teen children at ShieldsGroup had to change her e-mail address because she was receiving pornography.

    In light of this, PLEASE DO NOT sign up people at ShieldsGroup for free things online. Doing this will put their e-mail addresses on lists and they will get things they don’t want.

    Please DO NOT instruct web sites to send ONLINE GREETING CARDS, PHOTO ALBUMS, NEWS STORIES, or anything else like that to participants at ShieldsGroup.

    Here’s the rule of thumb: Never type an e-mail address ANYWHERE except in the “To:” field of a message you are sending from you to the recipient.

    I know this sounds a little extreme, but we have had to stop using e-mail addresses in the past because of the nasty stuff that companies who bought my e-mail sent.

    Thanks!

    ~~Steve