I get them dailey. Advertisements like “Are you Horney?” and “Barely Legal!”
Just wondering. I delete them everyday.
That’s happened to me too, except I’m getting e-mail ads from places I’ve never heard of, not porn.
I’m extremely carefull about my e-mail address and hardly use it outside of family and friends.
Once joining SD, however, I noticed they’ve entered my personal account.
Do you sell the names of users?
There’s a checkbox in your account that lets you hide your e-mail address if you want… I’m not sure what the default is. If you leave your address visible, then any of us other Dopers can drop you a line, if we want to follow up on a thread somehow, or whatever. Unfortunately, it also allows aomeone with a few computer skills to write a robot to scan the entire SD membership for e-mail addresses. Even if you hide the e-mail address, it’s still on the server, and acessible to administrators if need be, but they don’t sell anything to marketers.
On another note: Are you certain that the leak came here? No matter how careful you are about giving out your address, some ISPs will sell lists of all their members, and others (AOL comes to mind) don’t deliberately sell lists, but are notoriously insecure, and members lists can be easily stolen.
I suspect your address was on a list given out by someone other than the SDMB. We do not make our member’s e-mail addresses available to anyone.
Or perhaps, like Chronos stated, it was stolen from somewhere other than here. I’ve had my work account available on this board since I registered in May of 1999 and have received less than a half dozen pieces of spam at this address. (Nope, I don’t use any filters either.) So I don’t think it was stolen from here.
I get no spam at my address. For what it is worth.
Of course know that I said that I’ll probably start getting some. Fuck.
I’ll second what the other posters have said. I get spam at my other e-mail addresses, but I’ve never received any at the address I use at the SDMB. (As a matter of fact I have use two e-mail addresses in my days at the SDMB and neither of them has ever received any spam.)
And if some smart-aleck reads this and decides to teach me a lesson by signing up my current SDMB address for a “get-rich-quick” newsletter, rest assured, I will not rest until I have tracked you down, tied you down to a chair with your eyelids propped open (à la Clockwork Orange) and force you to watch all the Pokemon movies and cartoons.
That is beyond cruel .
No spam here either .
NO. We despise spam and fight it at every turn. That’s why the Member List option was disabled, to keep our list from being harvested by spammers.
This sort of thing tends to come in waves . . . you’ll not get any for a while, then you’ll be inundated with it. Or at least, that’s my experience.
Of late, I’m getting a lot of it, spam and porn . . . and not only that, porn via AOL Instant Messenger and Buddy List Invites. And I routinely get every scam and password stealer thing in creation, often the same thing sent several times.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Thanks. I should change my profile.
Actually, I’ve wanted to change my profile for a while now. The FAQ is worthless on where to change it. I see nothing on the pages that lets you do this.
In the upper right hand corner, to the right of the SD banner, there are seven icons. One says “profile”. Click on it. Then you can change whatever you want.
I also started receiving spam shortly after signing up at Straight Dope. Purely coincidence. It didn’t take long to figure out that my own e-mail provider had sold me out. Each time a I go to their site I’m forced to answer a survey before I can get to where I want. After each survey, my spam volume increases.
[hijack]
If you want a freebie e-mail adress, I don’t recommend Flashmail. I have written them 6 times asking why they block mail from Egroups (which I use to keep in touch with college friends) and have never received a response. Now, I just use them as a repository for Straight Dope notifications.
[/hijack]
Our home computer here has multiple users; at one time one of them was my ex-husband (who fortunately no longer lives here) Shortly after we went on-line, my daughters started getting e-mail from porn sites. We now suspect that my ex may have had something to do with that. aha (love that name), are you at a computer that is not secure, or has multiple users on one account? That is just one possible idea of how you may be getting the unwanted stuff.
By the way, my ex-husband just loved Spam (the kind that comes in cans).
Pepper-
Urghh… I looked up there and completely spaced on what it meant or just overlooked it.
Thanks
Chris
I myself wondered about this. It seemed like I started getting an awful lot of junk mail after I signed up here–porn ads and pyramid schemes, mostly. I thought about just disabling the e-mail address–it’s not like anyone from here e-mails me anyway–but I hated to do that.
So I decided to try something. I went and got a Yahoo e-mail account specifically for this board–I don’t use it for anything else. So far I have received not one piece of junk mail, which seems to show that the spam-meisters aren’t gathering addresses off the SDMB.
I did almost the same thing as MysterEcks, my e-mail account on here is only used for these boards, and not a single piece of spam have I gotten on that account.
Even if this is the only place you use your email address, and you’re getting spam there, there’s no reason to blame the SDMB. If you’ve made your email address visible, anyone can come in here and get it. Disabling the members link made it harder for spammers, but someone could come in here and browse addresses all day if they wanted. It’s a truism that any email address released publicly on the web will be hit with spam eventually.
It doesn’t even have to be released publically. I got some spam at a hotmail account I basically stopped using altogether. The to part of the spam read like this “vilesilencer@hotmail.com, vilesilencer@eartlink.net, vilesilencer@yahoo.com” etc etc. They were just mass mailing to a specific name at every mail company out there.
All right, 'fess up out there! Who signed me up for the “Ultimate-Pokemon” mailing list!!! :mad:
Actually I got a good chuckle out of it. Luckily, it was a list that required me to confirm my acceptance, otherwise my mailbox might have been filled with Pokemon e-mail, and I would be moderating with a vengeance today.
I once visited a particular porno web site, where I left no personal info. For the next week, I kept getting porno e-mail, which pissed my wife off to no end.
My theory as to what happened: their page had a Javascript that tested whether I had a default AOL setup. Once it determined that I did, it was easy for it to find my default login name and send it to their server.
How is it I get spam that doesn’t even have my address on it? It is addressed to an email address that isn’t remotely like mine, and the from: address is bogus, so replies get returned as undeliverable. They also seem to use rotating random addresses, so if I block one address, I get the same spam the next day from another seemingly randomly generated address. Howdeydodat?