Just got this email in my spam folder:

Greetings my dear
How are you today, i hope every things is ok with you, i am Miss elizabeth as is my pleassure to contact you after viewing your e-mail in www.avonfriendsforum.co.uk I am really interested in having communication with you, so if you will have the desire with me so that we can get to know each other better and see what will happened in future.
i will be very happy if you can write me back to know all about each other, here is my e-mail(elizabethaziku@yahoo.com) i will be waiting to hear from you soon, as i wish you all the best for your day.
elizabeth.

Didn't realise I even had my email address on display, but I'm going to check it out.

I just got this email too!

.. and I just checked and my email address isn't on my profile! So I'm not sure how our email addresses have been accessed

Me too!! what is going on!?

I received this as well!!!How did they/her acess our information?

Looked in my email after reading this thread and low and behold I had this email in my spam file. Must have been something dodgy for my spam filter to pick it up.

I think it must be from reading the site. If you have ever listed your email addy on a thread (which I have) for things like campaign previews or exchange of documents etc

It must have been something like this, tell you why. When I joined, the site would not accept my main email addy which is with googlemail, so I joined with a yahoo addy that I don't use. The googlemail addy is the one I have posted in threads, never the other one. Logical conclusion is the spammer has gleaned our addy's from the forum threads.

Hope this helps.

Just had a look at the memberlist and although I don't see their email addy's, there's no-one who has recently joined who looks obviously like the spammer.

Unfortunately, you don't have to be a member to read the threads, so they quite possibly aren't registered and the only thing to do is report them to yahoo.com for sending spam.

Yes, I have had this email too.

I got it too...

The only thing I can think of is the spammer is using some kind of bot or just manually to scanning the posts/sigs and memberlists of random forums to harvest email addy's.

We did have a hit from someone who found us by using the key phrase in Google "powered by phpbb". This would have brought up every phpbb forum on the web which, unfortunately, included ours.

We do check every new members account to make sure they're legit before we approve them so that keeps the rubbish off the board at least.

Not really any fool proof way round it m'afraid Best just to ignore them and take some comfort in knowing that we're unlikely to be the only forum community online who this person found

We could set the board to private so only registered members can access it but I'm not sure how many new visitors would just surf away rather than take the time to register a new account.

Any thoughts???

I'm not too bothered about going private Karen. I usually don't join a forum until I can read at least a few threads and see how good it is.

And I know that anyone who needs to speak to me would do it through here anyway. There so many bots for spamming these days, it shocking and they are so easy to pick up, this is just another one in a long list for me I'm afraid!

I like the idea of being public as I did not join in straight away...and her email went to my eletronic bin

I've had it too - it was in my spam folder

I don't remember ever using my email address in a post but ah well, the people who send those emails are idiots if they think anyone will fall for it. Best thing is to just delete it.

Karyn, I think we should keep the forum public, so people who haven't joined will be able to read the posts and this will encourage them to join

Yep good stuff, we'll just leave it as it is

Shame about the losers who think they'll drum up some business by annoying people in online communities like ours a bit sad really.

I received the exact same email today except the persons name was Joy Yak with email joy rray1000@yahoo.com just thought i would let you all know

Same thing again, reading our email addys from the posts.