Hi Oswaldo,

I sympathize with you about the spam. A recent report said about 40% of all
emails sent on the Internet is spam. However, I would like to point out
that the one post you made in September of 2002 only had your email address
in it because you put it in the body of the message. The archives makes
every effort to not publish email addresses. The only reason an email
address will get posted is if you put it in your email body or use it
instead of your name (i.e. the server takes the  field for FROM: in
the email header and drops the email address).

Your posting today came through and posted to the archives with no email
address information. I have removed your email address from the posting in
September, 2002.

When I see email harvest robots enter the site, I'll block them, but it's
not a perfect system. The purpose of making the web site accessible over
the Internet is so that histology professionals from around the world (like
yourself) can find it and hopefully decide to participate in this new
frontier in Histology. There are also people who can't subscribe because of
the large volume of messages, but can still keep up through the archives.

It is possible to make the site available only to subscribers (through
passwords), but there are disadvantages. It is also possible to block all
robots.

The servers gets thousands of hits a day from histologists around the world
looking for answers to the problems in their labs. If those of you who are
concerned about your email address will follow the guidelines above, your
email address will not be published on the Internet. The only way you
should know the email address of other subscribers is to subscribe to the
listserver (which harvester robots can also do anonymously).

I hope you choose to continue to be a part of the Histonet community. Your
participation is valued.

Best Regards,

Marvin Hanna



>Dear histoneters,
>
>I usually handle a certain amount of spam (maybe 20% or 30%) with not
>too much pain (thanks to Mailwasher: www.mailwasher.net). However, since
>posting at this mail list I have noticed a huge, enormous increase on
>the amount of spam received daily. No doubt it is related with the
>archiving of all the mails and their unrestricted access to the
>addresses-harvesting bots. As I see it, there are only a number of
>measures to solve this situation. The first of course is individual, to
>post with a fake address. However, it is a pity if we cannot know the
>real address of the people posting, as there is no opportunity for
>private exchange/discussion. The other individual solution is to
>unsubscribe, something I have even thought about. There would also be
>some collective measures related with the access to the archives only to
>subscribers, or archiving without the from: field, although I understand
>these could be unpopular or technically difficult.
>
>Anyway, I'd like to collect some opinions about how people handles the
>multiple offers of enlarging some parts of our anatomy and reducing some
>others, which come through this list. To me, these are simply too many
>to continue posting here with my real address. This is the last one.
>
>Oswaldo