Features Of Nigerian Spam

SPAM is used by scammers, thieves, porn sites, chain mailers, forgers and others selling dubious products. The first lie is that "you signed up", or "opted in" to their list. The last lie is that they will take you off their list if you respond. Everything in between the first and last word is also probably lies.

Responding to the "remove me" link on SPAM that appears to be from legitimate companies produces more SPAM.

Spammers use forged return e-mail address often including the numerical address. They arehiding and do not want to be found. They use forgery, lies and deceit to do so. These untraceable addresses are produced by special servers hosted by countries so desperate that they endorse SPAM and are willing to do business with liars, cheats and thieves of the worse sort. These are the rogue terrorist nations of the cyberworld.

THINK about the kind of person that hides in the dark using lies and deceit before responding to any SPAM offer.

The general rule has always been not to post your e-mail address in a public place if you didn't want to get spammed. Many of us ignored that rule. Others such as myself as a webmaster have my e-mail addresses publicly posted everywhere on the many web sites I manage. But often your Internet Service Provider or someone associated with them gives away your e-mail address. The result is that we ALL get a lot of SPAM.

When you post your e-mail address on public forums where it can be read by the public OR members of the group your address is deemed public property by spammers. Spammers use programs called "harvesters" to glean e-mail addresses by the thousands from public forums.

These programs work like your browser downloading pages, but instead of displaying the page they sift through the page reading the e-mail addresses and putting them in a database. The database is usually indexed by the type of forum or web site (they KNOW what your interests are).

To keep OUR users (you) safe from SPAM we instituted a e-mail encryption system on our Virtual Hammer-In and Guru's Den forums in 2001. This system lets people contact you but it prevents SPAM harvesters from using our pages as SPAM farms. It is not perfect, it is a compromise. We will be expanding this proprietary system in the future.

We do not use our encryption system in the Slack-Tub Pub because the e-mail addresses there are transient and not kept in the logs.

Even forums that require a login and password are not safe. Spammers register for every new forum and add the login and password to their harvester engine. If you have ever registered for ANY of the public forums on places like Yahoo or eGroups you will be getting SPAM within hours.

Some forums SELL your information. If their terms of service (TOS) say, "only uses necessary to provide you service", that may mean turning user lists over to advertisers (in order to pay for the service).