At 09:29 AM 3/14/2003 -0500, you wrote: I got one too! How do we stop this stuff ? Les K4NK -------------------------------------- Stopping spam (unwanted e-mail solicitation) is not an easy prospect. If it were, the IT (Information Technology) Industry would have it figured out by now. One problem is that spammers "Spoof" (forge) the e-mail address and IP address from which they send the mail, and they change their settings with nearly every item they send, so patterns are difficult to recognize. So that leaves IT staff trying to find patterns in the body of the message itself to identify what is spam and what is not. These methods are only about 80% effective in identifying spam and unfortunately falsely identify legitimate messages as spam (deleting them when they should be sent) up to 25% of the time. It's just not an easy thing to figure out. And how did they get our e-mail addresses? Probably from the ARRL Web Site. They have automated processes (called worms and bots in the trade) that continuously surf the Internet harvesting e-mail addresses from web pages. Just for fun I put a phoney e-mail address on my web site. I started receiving spam directed at to that e-mail address within about 8 hours. Then there is the issue of the "Remove Me" that they are supposed to put on every e-mail by law in a number of states (including California). The law doesn't require the link to work, apparently, and most of them don't. And of the ones that do, my guess is that half of them disable to address for their spam engine and turn around and sell the address to someone else (you get twice as much for a "confirmed" e-mail address, and by entering it on the "Remove Me" page, you are confirming it for them). 73, Andy Oppel, N6AJO Vice Director, Pacific Division, ARRL n6ajo@arrl.org home: (510) 864-2299 cell: (510) 508-6379