Diana Kulaga wrote:

Second, I put my own name into the Google search, and came up with a bunch
of posts via a message board in UK, Garden Banter. Just for the heck of it,
I tried some other names, including my husband's. He's on line regularly,
though he doesn't do groups. His name came up, but it was clearly someone
else. I tried some names from this NG, and only one came up in the context
of Garden Banter, even though lots of us are referenced on that board. For
example, Ray - your name came up numerous times, but never attached to
Garden Banter.

I noticed Garden Banter in the access logs to my website- it seems that
this board mirrors a couple of newsgroups, displaying postings to
rec.gardens.orchids as if they were postings to this board. It's similar
to Google Groups, only in a different format. I'm not sure, but I think
it also works as a gateway, so if someone posts to the Garden Banter
board, it will show up here.

Spammers will often collect Names and addresses from Newsgroup or the
internet to pretend their spam came from there.

As for munging the reply-to address, it's simple, but creates problems
of its own, a) the domain youre inventing might exist, channeling spam
directed at you to them, b) if it's a non-existing domain, spam will
bounce back and forth, creating traffic, blocking the road, so to speak.
Some news providers don't allow munged addresses for these reasons, but
encourage usage of a junkmail account, if you will, with a free provider
like yahoo. You use that address in your posts, all junkmail goes there,
every once in a while you delete it all. A notice in your posts that
that you don't read mail going to that address is helpful if people want
to contact you .

Once you've used your real address in a newsgroup though, it really
doesn't matter, your address is probably collected already, the only
thing that helps would be setting up an account like I mentioned above,
*and* changing your main address.

Or you start filtering spam out by using a program like SpamPal
(www.spampal.com)

Nina
--
C'est les microbes qui auront le dernier mot.
Louis Pasteur
http://www.chaotropic.net