Bill,

Without a doubt there are robots and spiders that harvest email addresses. They work quite simply.

It is easy to imagine how one would do it manually.

1) Load a web page
2) Search the web page and create 2 files, one would contain any links in the page, the other would contain any email addresses in the page.
3) Pick a new link from the list of links.
4) Go to step 2

As you can see, you would soon have a HUGE list of email addresses. This process can be automated very easily.

Just imagine how many email addresses are available in my Chip Links section and in Chequers database of chippers.

There are so many places to harvest email addresses, it would be very tough to pinpoint just where the address was harvested from.

I get about 10 - 20 spams a day. At least 5 of them come from an email account that I haven't used in 3 or 4 years.

I believe that using your email address in a message on the board is not going to have any significant change on the number of spams you get.

Greg