Hello Sandi,

It would appear that your email address has been distributed to outside "vendors" without your written consent or with 
the consent stated in the contract with your internet service provider (ISP).  Or someone may have scanned various 
public newsgroups to acquire valid addresses; since the Histonet is a publicly accessible group, they may have 
scooped it up from here.  These spammers are quite creative in getting addresses and effective in distributing their bulk 
mailings.

As an anecdotal personal experience, I've received mixed results with email distribution from a few ISPs over the last 
seven years.  I started with FlashNet (dial-up services) and rarely received spam.  It was subsequently acquired by 
Prodigy (dial-up services) during an ISP industry shakeout and the spam started to flow; ie multiple spam messages 
daily.  I have since switched ISPs to @Home (ATT broadband services) and have yet (7 months) to receive a spam 
message.

My guess is that your ISP (AOL from your message header) is not filtering bulk email adequately or are, in fact, selling 
your email address to these unscrupulous companies.  I do not have specific evidence of this occurring in your case (for 
the AOL legal team, this is my disclaimer) so I can only recommend that you read the fine print of your contract and 
follow up by perusing their most current privacy policies.  Email addresses are one of an ISP's most valuable assets 
since it is a direct link to real customers of cyberspace and a potential revenue stream for other products.  It is a 
common practice to sell email addresses just like residential home addresses and phone numbers; further, e-commerce 
companies sell these lists to other companies when they themselves go out of business.  So, any privacy policy that 
was in place to protect your business association may well be compromised when the company changes hands.

My suggestions to minimize spam:
1- complain to your ISP (visit their website to see how they handle spam, too)
2- filter your email with your own email software
3- change ISPs
4- visit www.junkbusters.com (an excellent resource on personal privacy)

Regards,
Todd Sherman


9/23/2001 2:12:09 PM, Snobird75@aol.com wrote:

>   Are other's on the histonet receiveing trash emails, like XX and emails
>   about diet stuff and other XX trash to visit sites. 
>   I only use this email address for histonet and have never been in a chat
>   room with this email address, but yet I still receive garbage. 
>   I just wanted to know if I was the only one. 
>   Thanks 
>   Sandi Miller