AOL Strikes . . .

Well not AOL itself but my Email account has been "spoofed."  Spoofing is not the same as hacked.  When hacked one can change his or her password and that takes care of the problem.  Spoof is when they steal your address and send out some kind of a message using you good name.  In my case the spoof, and the embedded address, signed me up for thousands of accounts worldwide.  Mostly somebodys blog, news letters, etc.  I mean they had to work to build that big address list and to irritate a innocent user.

I had messages pouring in from China, India, Russia, all of Europe, Middle East, South Africa and so on and on and on.

Now AOL provides a way to keep the messages from getting into your Email account and sends the message directly to the spam account.  It is called a spam filter.  The key is to getting rid of the message by sending it originally to your spam account.  There is a little Icon up on top that you can check.  The work is checking all the messages and sending to the spam account the first time puts all the sending addresses into the spam filter and the filter sends the messages to the spam account. 

At the peak, we had upwards of 8,000 messages in the spam account.  I would open AOL, go to the spam account and delete all the messages.  It quickly gets rid of the messages.  The good news is all those address that were originally contacted are easily deleted out of the spam account with just one click.  The senders quickly realize that they are sending the message to a fictitious account and quit doing it.

So we have been spamming message after message, leaving of course those we want to read and react to.  All the others are literally trashed.

It would seem AOL would take some action but since it is a free account there is no profit in doing anything to fix anything.  So they let it ride.  It creates a lot of traffic through their system but that is not a problem to them.  So they do not care

We have had this account address since 1994 and I want to keep it.  So we deal with it, sending all the unusual messages direct to spam.  And later clean out the spam account.  So the messages are really all going into nether land.

It is frustrating to deal with but can be dealt with.