Recently, there was an incident on this list where someone asked people
to take a survey. Alan threw her off the list, replying that the people
on this list "are not here to be used." I did not know what he meant at
first, until he stated later that this was one way people get e-mail
addresses for spam. I'm not going to pass judgment as to whether the
woman was trying to do that. However, I would like to know of other
ways that someone might obtain your e-mail address for unsolicited
commercial purposes.
Some ways are obvious, but some are not. For instance, last semester,
my physics professor had a website for the class where you could look up
homework assignments, labs, answers to previous tests, etc. He also
provided a list of e-mail addresses of the students in the class so that
if you had a question about an assignment, you could e-mail another
student. He was well aware in advance of some students concerns about
this list. One of them was that someone could find the list using a
program that searches the web for e-mail addresses, and then send spam
to the addresses. However, the professor decided that good aspects of
the list outweighed the bad, and as far as I know, there were no bad
incidents involving the list. However, I did not realize that there
were programs that search the web for lists of e-mail addresses.
Andrew
