Posted: 8/9/2005 2:12:18 AM EDT
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Maybe it is an auto-bot using the "email user" button? The email addresses of people signing up aren't given out or sold. All it takes is ONE time for your email to be posted on a webpage of any sort (including a post, like an "email me at: [email protected]" for the spam spiders to get your address. I run spamassasin and Mozilla Thunderbird, so after that and ar15.com's anti-spam check, I only get about 3 spam per day I need to delete, while the other 400 are automatically deleted... |
I don't see how. The "e-mail user" button just sends out an e-mail with "email from ar15.com" (or something like that) at the bottom, I don't see how the sender could obtain an e-mail address that way since the sender does not see the e-mail address if the recipient does not reply. You used to be able to view someone's e-mail address in the user profile, but Juan changed all that to prevent spamming/e-mail mining. |
I should have mentioned why I sent the IM!  The original poster of this thread had apparently used his email address just once on a public webpage a few months ago. One time is all it took for the spam harvesters to collect the address and add it to junk lists. Another trick that spammers use is to gather a huge list of known mail usernames (like john@, bill@, etc.) and try them all in conjunction with a domain name. While it's likely that many will be bounced, most of the more common addresses will go through. Now that your username (the part in front of the @) is known, it's likely that it will be added to the list. I hate spammers. |
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My main reason for bring this to everyones attention was not to slam AR15.com they appear to have done nothing wrong, and that I was sure I wasn't alone with this problem. Some peoples mail is already so overly full of spam that they may not have noticed the differance after registering here. I realize it is most likly a basic script-kiddy harvester program doing the dirty work and I am not accusing AR15.com of directly giving out an info. The way most "harvester programs" work any average webhost would or could notice a harvester script at work in the logs, much like a web-riper accept not as much bandwidth being hogged by a single IP and harvesters usually only go for credit card numbers, email or IP addy's. What surprised me is that my AR15.com email address was changed repeatedly after registering (but will not take...) and it is set to not show my email address or allow others to email me... |
Pony up some $$ and become a MEMBER - then you can use an [email protected] address. 
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We do everything we can to hide and protect email addresses for this exact reason. In the past we had the "email" user button simply list their email address, we also listed it in their profiles, but then we started seeing mail scavengers hitting the site and grabbing all the addresses they could get. We then removed every display of email accounts and put in a site mailer which would handle the email traffic to users and keep their accounts private. At this point, the only way to give away your email address is to respond to a site generated email (that person would then have your address) or to post it in a thread. That's about it. 
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