My name is Kevin and I operate the GardenBanter website referred to in an earlier post.

As correctly described earlier, the website acts as a gateway for many of the gardening newsgroups, allowing viewing and posting to the newsgroups through the web browser rather than a newsreader. (similar to google)

All email addresses are discarded from the headers of the posts. The only time the email addy will turn up is if it is in the body or footer of the message, or occasionaly, when someone with a newsreader has replied without snipping, and their headings on the newsreader are set to 'show'.

In order to assist with the spam (harvesting) issues for users of the site, I set up a system that delivers a unique email address with every post, which is linked backed to GardenBanter, spam filtered, and the genuine message kept at the site until the user logs in next. It's not perfect, but it does help and very little spam gets through. This way it can keep your own email address seperate, but still allow messages to be received.

There is no perfect system - beware that the latest email harvesters will search and remove words like NOSPAM from the address, or any group of letters in uppercase. You need to be creative to keep them fooled.