Diaryland vs. Spam:

A few times lately, Diaryland users have written asking about spam that they get to their Diaryland email accounts, or that seems to have come through the Diaryland server. I decided to write a few FAQ-like questions so that everyone knows what the deal is!

Q: I got spam at my diaryland.com address, why is that? Did Diaryland give out my address?

A: Nope! The way that spammers get email addresses is usually by sending out programs called 'spiders' that search every web page they can find for email addresses. They copy down every email address they find, and stick them on spam lists. If your email address appears on any web page, there is a chance you will get spam unfortunately.

Q: I got spam and when I read the headers, it seemed to come through the Diaryland server

A: All mail to diaryland.com addresses comes through the Diaryland server, so yeah, it did come through us, all mail to your Diaryland account comes through us!

Q: An email I got was address to [email protected] and I know that benicetobears.com is the Diaryland mail server. Does this mean that the mail server is weak and there is some trick to sending mail through it?

A: Nope, the problem is that spammers often disguise the email addresses they are sending to by making it look like it went to some address that doesn't exist. In this case, they are making it look like it went to [email protected] because that's the server your mail goes through. I hope I explained that well! I could get a lot more technical there, but basically yeah, they just are sticking the servername after the @ as a trick.

Q: What can I do to get less spam?

A: The best thing is to obscure your email address on your page by writing it funny, like instead of writing [email protected], you could write [email protected] and then also write on the page that you need to remove the REMOVETHIS in order to send mail properly. real humans who see this will understand, but the stupid spam spider programs will not, so you will get less spam. Another good trick is to go to http://spamcop.net and report all spam you get. They have instructions there on how to do it, and it will help you in the long run for sure!

Q: I have more questions!

A: Write to [email protected] and we can help you out!