Hi everyone
There have been some thoughtful comments on this topic. I still hold
to the principle that anyone contributing to this forum should use
their real name - if that's a first name and initial, so be it. In
time, we'll learn who Fred A. is and what he usually writes about, or
that Jenny Z. usually has something interesting to report. Yes, the
open archives do expose authors to spam, and it's something that I'll
follow up with Andrew T. (!) who maintains the archive.
As long as contributors keep their phone numbers and home addresses out
of birding-aus messages, the only threat to privacy will be the risk of
having your email address added to spam-mail lists. You can deal with
spam in many different ways - just deleting it is effective enough but
most ISPs and mail programs now have sophisticated tools for filtering
and/or blocking spam. I have several email addresses, on different
systems - some attract a lot of spam, some none at all. Most of the
spam I see is in the form of messages bounced from Birding-Aus:
messages trapped by my filters, or more often, messages refused by
Vicnet because they've failed the "spam rules" of some very
sophisticated software.
I've recently started using a Gmail (Google Mail) account, and this
hasn't had any spam yet - and it has a superb system of organising
messages by topic. I'd recommend gmail as the best of the free webmail
systems.
So please continue to use your real name - even if it's just a part of
it - and of course try to keep your messages more on-topic than this
one!!
Cheers
Russell
Russell Woodford
Birding-Aus List Owner
Geelong Victoria Australia
http://www.birding-aus.org
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