Fight spam.

[evulish]

This isn't about team 180 But more along the lines of the other other kind of spam. Yes, the email kind. After getting back from competition, my family's email account had 511 emails in it...only 8 of which were from people we knew. After 10 years of submitting our email address to just about everything, this is bound to happen. Our email address is plastered all over the web.

On that note, I noticed that many people have posted their plain email address on these forums. This is such a bad idea. The best way for a spam bot to grab email addresses is to browse things like forums and webchats. People post their email address not thinking about who/what could be receiving it. There is a simple way to get around this. Post your email address with misleading characters in it. For example: joesmith[AT]inter.net or anything like that. After 2 years of owning an email address, I have received no spam whatsoever using this method (and carefully inspecting sites to submit my email address to). This will eliminate so much new spam! The down side to this is that you can't get rid of lists that already have your email address. Adopting this method will only stop new spambots from finding it.

I don't know if this is known too much...but I've been seeing a lot of email addresses on this forum.

Public service announcement brought to you by the letter 'e.'

[rbayer]

Another good way to do it is to leave your email in your profile since nobody can actually see it--they can only click the "email" link. Also, PMs can't be scanned by 'bots, so you can always PM someone your address.

On a final note, I currently maintain 6 email addresses that I check daily. One for normal stuff, one for Robo* stuff, one for some different Robo* stuff, one for school, one for spam, and one for when I'm on the road. My primary account receives NO spam whatsoever, largely because I'm careful about where I give that address.