I got an email last week with a subject heading, "a response to you post on rodbuilding.org question blah blah blah". It did not contain any attachments and had been scanned via my Norton security program. So I felt safe in opening it. I read the email and it was obvious it was a spam inquiry for an active email address because now I am getting more spam that I can every remember. I have tweaked my scanning utility to filter out certain heading words, but today I got something that was startling.

I received an email from photobucket that said someone had requested my password be sent out because they were having problems logging in at the main entrance page. You know the button you click when you forget your password. This is not unusal, the email contain my information and correct password and it was from them, but I didn't request it. I haven't visited the photobucket storage site in some time.

I was wondering if anything "fishey" has been going on with the other posters email boxes that are active here on the site?

Thanks Tom for allowing me to post this inquiry.

Domenic Federico
Infinity Rod Creations
Wickliffe, Ohio

Yikes! Hasn't happened to me yet but I appreciate you posting the heads up. Hopefully, knowledge of a potential scam will help scare off the dirt bag that is doing it.

This site is not associated with Photobucket in any way so anything that came to you with your info from there, came from somone on that end.

If at all possible, never respond to anyone with an email address from yahoo or hotmail. Of course, once they enter your address even once, yahoo and hotmail will collect and add it to the lists they sell to spammers.


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I beg to differ. I have been using a Yahoo email address as my primary address almost since they first started. They do a very good job of filtering out spam into a bulk mail bucket that I simply empty without ever looking at it. To my knowledge, Yahoo doesn't sell addresses to spammer, it would just create more problems for them.

Tom- Thanks for the clarification on the lack of a relationship between photobucket - Rodbuilding.org

Steve E.- I think what Tom was saying is that if you have a email address that is other than a yahoo extension and you reply to a person who has emailed you from a yahoo or hotmail box, your email address gets thrown into the "till" to be used and resused.

Domenic Federico

Yahoo and Hotmail (Microsoft) are in business to sell email addresses. That is the point of their existance. No doubt spammers (advertisers) get email addresses anywhere they can, but if you want tens of thousands, or even millions, in one fell swoop, you go to Yahoo or Hotmail.

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I have several private email address on yahoo that I set up to correpsond directly with persons for business purposes. The accounts have been up for over two years now, one since 2002. The only emails I get on two out of the three accounts are a few emails from yahoo explaining their services, and the emails from business people. I have not used these accounts for anything other than this.

ONE email account, and only one, is set up strictly for use when registering and doing business online. This email account gets spammed big time, but yahoo's spam engine deletes 99.9% of them.

My "true" email addresses, on the cox.net server, I have never revealed to anyone but a few close friends and family members.

If you do NOT give out your email address you will not be spammed. If you do then that sets you up for spamming. Not all companies, but some do sell email lists, which in turn are sold further on.

Another popular ploy by spammers is to blindly send out emails and blindly increment the spelling of email addresses by one letter or number and increment the mix by one each time the email is sent out. Any emails not bounced back indicate a possibly good email, and a target for further spam.

Many servers (domains) have been blackballed for being originators or spam and have been added to the blacklists spam filters use. This affects legitimate users of the affected systems because suddenly their email is being treated as spam since it is flagged as originating from the blacklisted server. Time to change ISPs if this happens.

Having a firewall up and running will do little to stop spammers. Spam filters on the otherhand can be taught to accept certain emails from blackballed domains.

Best thing to do is not to give out you local email address, register and use an email service such as yahoo to intercept junk mail, and use a spam filter. Mozilla Thunderbird has a very nice spam filter that does a great job.

Lou

Never click on a porno site, even for a quick look.
I did and now have about 50 of them blocked, seems they keep coming in from diferent addresses

hi i want to chang my id @ of my name and do not know how to change it please help me