Hi Jeff,

I have to say, I've had my email address listed on this site since I became a member. The only time I received anything like SPAM was from a student who was phishing for help with an assignment.

There have been other times when I did find myself getting SPAMMED, but the worst was when I included my email address in an eBay listing. I got phishing emails trying to trick me into giving up my username and password, not only for eBay but for Paypal also. And they were actually quite well made emails, to the extent that they were very cleverly deceptive.

They used the actual graphics that eBay or Paypal would use in sending out official emails, so they looked real. And they coded the HTML so that the hot link they wanted you to click looked like an eBay URL. Do you know how a URL is automatically hot-linked when you type it into an email? But, if you type in your own HTML you can make the hot link say whatever you want. Well, they did that, but then inserted text that looked like an eBay signin page URL. The first one I noticed because the status bar at the bottom of the window showed a different URL than the one typed into the text. Later I got a few that actually went to the trouble of coding the HTML so that even the status bar showed the fake eBay URL, but the link still went to their web site.

Anyway, as soon as I took my email address and/or URL out of the text of the eBay listing (where the web-crawlers/data-miners could easilly find it), the SPAM stopped. But for all the years that my email address has been publicly availlable here at 8052.com I've never had a problem. Whatever Craig is doing, it seems to work.