Dear Sir, We recently started a Listserve for our club and the member list was installed in the software.

Using my address as an an example the format was: ---- at ----.com instead of my actual address.

The list was on the site, which was reasonably restricted for members only, for less than 72 hours. Many seniors (members) were EXTREMELY concerned the address was available to the world and they were going to get more spam than they already were and their privacy was totally compromised. A System Engineer advised us this was next to impossible. Your comments on such a probability would be greatly appreciated!

Hi ---, That's a nice looking site you have there. I agree with your sys eng. You have three things going for you:

1. The list is restricted to members only. This means a bot is not going to 'stumble across it'. Someone would have to obtain a membership in order to harvest those email addresses. (a question to ask: how easy is it to obtain a membership?)

2. Even if they can get a membership, nobody is going to sit and manually enter all those email addresses, just so they can spam them.

3. Someone would have to specifically program a bot to convert your email address format into real email addresses. Now, if your list contained hundreds of thousands addresses, a spammer might think it was worth the bother to break in and snag those addresses. But with a much smaller membership, they probably wouldn't think it was worth their bother, even if they did get in. I hope that is helpful to you.

Best wishes!