In Reply to: disturbing spam e-mail posted by John Bogner on June 20, 2003 at 00:01:35:
: Got an especially sleazy e-mail from someone who claims to be e-mailing all KHS graduates.
Hello All,
This is your webmaster. I got the same spam that John did. I know exactly how the spammer did it. Frankly, it's quite easy. The email addresses were "mined" from our guestbook with a piece of software designed for that purpose.
Any time you put your email on a web site this is a possibility.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that this has happened to our site, but I get so much spam that I couldn't be certain that none has come from my having made a guestbook entry here.
If this becomes a bigger problem, there are a couple of solutions:
1. Eliminate email addresses from the guest book, which kinda' defeats the purpose of having a guestbook, or
2. Go to a system like classmates.com uses, which is database driven and hides your email address.
I admit that I don't have a clue how to do the latter, and doubt that I coud come up with the time to put it in place if I did know how.
If anyone knows of a good solution to this problem, please let me know.
Thanks.