Fri Sep 19 20:53:11 CDT 1997

If you are using a modified email address to avoid unsolicited bulk mail,
you have our sympathy but we don't believe that this tactic will work for
long. Harvesters are already beginning to edit addresses to remove these
tags, so you're just going to have to keep mangling your address more and
more until you reach a point where you might as well have no email address
at all. And that's not a place where Usenet II wants to be.

Things that might work:

	1. If you're in the US, call up your representatives and ask them
	   to support the Netizens Protection Act. See www.cauce.org for
	   more unformation.

	   Since the vast majority of this fraudulent email comes from the
	   US, extending the junk fax law to email will cut the volume
	   dramatically.

	2. Get an account at usa.net, rocketmail, hotmail, netforward.com,
	   juno, or some other free email service and use that. When the
	   spam gets too bad, change it. 

	3. Get an ISP with a tough policy against email abuse that'll go
	   to bat for you against the spammers.

	4. If you've got control over your mail enough to do this, use a
	   three stage handshake for all new usernames so they have to
	   read a response to you before sending you spam, or even use a
	   pseudo-address with a limited lifetime (say, username-970915...
	   and start bouncing mail to that address after a week).

	5. I hate recommending filters, because the spammers pretend that
	   they're a complete solution against spam (no, sorry, by the time
	   it's hit my filter's I've already paid for it one way or another),
	   and I don't use them myself because all too often they get false
	   positives. But some people swear by them.

	6. There are things you can do to modify your existing address so
	   it doesn't look much like an email address to spammer bots, but
	   it's still a valid email address. I don't want to get to detailed
	   or they'll just modify their bots to catch your address anyway.
	   Mail me for more ideas.

					-- Peter da Silva
					   peter@taronga.com