Notice Regarding Email Addresses

[Dawg]

As many of you know, it is a constant battle to protect message boards such as ours from spammers. We will not permit this board to be taken over by anyone who will post toxic links that try to sell illegal pharmaceuticals, male enhancement products, or pornography, while also placing malware on our members' computers.

Most spammers accomplish this by automatically creating hundreds of email accounts with certain "free" email services, then using those accounts to create thousands of message board registrations; if those registrations are allowed (many message boards do not check new registrations manually, as we do), they post their garbage.

Some "free" services combat this problem. Others do nothing, and allow the spammers free reign. This means we must wade through hundreds of spam registrations each week that use only one or two of these "free" services.

So it is with much regret that we have come to the inevitable decision that we must stop allowing registrations from these particular email services.

Unfortunately, the forum software we use does not allow us to differentiate between new registrations and existing members. Once the ban goes into effect, not only will we cut our spam registrations by 99%, but we'll block access to the site for those members using these email domains. We want the former - we don't want the latter.

So if you are using an email address from gmail or either of the AOL domains (aol.com or aim.com), please log in and change your email address.

Gmail, aol, and aim domains will be banned from LauretteSpang.com effective August 15.

If you have any questions, or need help in changing your email address, please contact me at webmaster at laurettespang.com.

Thanks.

John Pickard
Webmaster, LauretteSpang.com

[julix]

I hope this helps!

[Athene]

Good to know Dawg and Thank You.

[Dawg]

All email addresses from gmail.com, aol.com, and aim.com are now banned from this site.

We deeply regret any inconvenience this causes, but as noted above we really had little choice.

We encourage the use of ISP-issued email addresses when registering on our forums. Your ISP is your Internet Service Provider, the company you pay for internet access.

And yes, we know some people still pay America Online (AOL) for their internet access, but since they started offering their email domain to non-paying customers the problem of spam registrations has grown to the point we must take positive action. Again, we deeply regret the inconvenience.

John Pickard
Webmaster, LauretteSpang.com

[Dawg]

We regret to announce to our UK friends that we have had to ban the UK Yahoo email domain for the same reasons we've recently had to ban AOL and Gmail.

Any email address that ends with "@yahoo.co.uk" will be automatically rejected.

We're very sorry.

John Pickard
Webmaster, LauretteSpang.com