Ever since I added my email address to my profile I have been getting an inordinate amount of SPAM. On Monday, 31 out of 41 new messages were SPAM. In articles I've read on SPAM, they usually mention that using your email address on public boards can cause SPAM. I'd hate to change my profile here to my SPAM account because I love the notifications the board sends on topics I'm interested in, but my inbox is suffering!

Is it possible the SPAM is coming from people who got my address from HA? Would the "Hide my email address from other members" option fix this barrage of SPAM or at least stop it from getting worse?

Any help would be appreciated.

Your email address already seems to be hidden? So no chance of getting spam because of posting here.

I just hid it before I posted.

Well, I just tested it with my own account and it doesn't display the email it seems, just offers you a form to write an email.

Not sure if it's always been like this though.

Well, if you add your email address in clear text to your message or signature, it's very possible that some automatic email collector picks it up, but otherwise email addys are never directly accessable: even if you enable "allow members to send me email," one has to access "send email" through a form which doesn't show the email address directly (HA server sends the email).

Good to know. Guess it was somthing else that triggered the deluge!

yet another effect of the dreade placebo effect :-)

there are several very good tools for dealing with spam. My choice, because it can also sort out and help you deal with other types of email (such as putting all business stuff into one class, family stuff into another class, etc etc) is popfile, which I believe I link to in my sig.

<edit> doh, if I had a sig, heh. must be thinking of my email sig. http://sourceforge.net/projects/popfile/

right.. he should have done a blind abx test before posti.... err.. nevermind

Perhaps. Something that has been on my mind for about three years is if the e-mail provider(s) are selling the addresses, rather it be by an ISP or from a free Internet email service, or if some sort of Internet ad banner company is somehow stealing and then selling the information.

I've been thinking of this since I've had numerous Internet email accounts over the years that nobody even knew about get hit with spam within 24 hours of creating the account. The spam is one reason I end up creating a new email address just about every year.

This is my corporate email. I work at a computer reseller so I have to use my email address to sign up for a lot of spiff and reward programs and manufacturer newsletters. I guess they aren’t keeping my email as private as I hoped they would. Since my email is a direct connection to an Exchange server, most anti-spam tools will not work. I guess I'll have to keep using that delete button until my employer decides to implement a gateway spam filter.

What is the consensus about the "unsubscribe" links. I've read that you shouldn't use them because it tells the sender that the email reached a valid user. All I do now is (with the Outlook preview pane turned off) hit ctrl+q to mark it read and send it to the trash. I do this because HTML spam have tiny graphics that when they load communicate back to the sender. Any other tips for dealing with spam when I can't use a program to filter/block them?

Try http://www.spamcop.net/

I'm actually using iHateSpam. I just started, so it is a bit manual for now but it promises to learn. Hopefully I can turn it into a lean, mean, spam fighting machine.

Spampal is a nice piece of software as well.
I used it some time ago and it works perfectly. Now my ISP has installed spam filtering software and the number of spam mails has reduced dramatically.