RE: hide email address

I just thought I'd mention this because it truly horrified me.  If you open
your email daily, chances are you haven't kept track of how much junk mail
you may be getting.  Here's what happened to me.  Almost exactly a year ago
I bought a Dell computer which came equipped with a dellnet (actually a
msn.com account) free.  Since I have cable I wouldn't consider going back to
dial up.  However, I signed up for the account anyway just to have a free
backup.

I got a letter from msn the other day telling me that unless I called them,
they were going to start billing for that account since my year is almost
up.  Out of curiosity, I opened the email account for the first time in a
year.  Now keep in mind I never gave the address to a single soul since I
knew I wouldn't use it.  All I ever did was sign up for the account.  As of
last week I had about 700 emails waiting for me.  I didn't open a single one
of those either.  Most of them were labeled very kindly by msn as SPAM, but
many were not.  A very large proportion were porn with the most graphic,
disgusting descriptions in the subject lines.

I am appalled at how much of this stuff is out there. I don't get any of
this stuff on my current account.  I get some spam and I get some unwanted
email, but nothing like this, thank goodness.  Anyway, I called msn and
reported this to them and they said I had to turn on some controls.  Well, I
never had to do that with my @home account.

After getting a few spams I did change all the mailto's on my website to be
encrypted by substituting the @ and dot signs with escape codes.  I believe
it's working for those forwarding addresses, no problems since, but I never
got a lot to start with.

Is everyone else using something like this?
KP

HTML: hwg-basics mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA