A couple months ago, people were complaining about the amount of
unsolicited email they received for services and products they did
not want.  This is known as "spam".

Allow me to share a couple insights:  The spammers need to get the
email addresses to send spam to from somewhere.  Therefore "harvesting"
programs were written.  One kind of program queries the member database
on AOL for "member profiles".  Another type of program looks at all
the messages posted on the Usenet news groups like rec.models.rockets,
sci.space,etc.  These programs are obviously not interested in the
member's profile or the news messages. They just catalog the email
address of the poster.

The bottom line: If you don't want to be the victim of a spammer,
don't post to news groups and don't fill out your AOL on-line profile.

Realistic?  No, but other than legislation, there is no real solution.

Jim Cook

 [ This is probably sound advice.  Although I'm not sure whether AOL
 [ profiles can be harvested at all, news group harvesting is a trivial
 [ thing to do.
 [
 [ Unfortunately, the more creative spammers are harvesting e-mail
 [ addresses from web sites as well, which is why I feel its necessary
 [ to do something.  It's not rocket science for the spammer's harvester
 [ programs to snip off ".nospam" strings, but at least we tried...
 [
 [ Jody