Contact Information for Offshore Press or Vernon K. Jacobs

When an email address is posted on a web page in the form of email@somedomain.com, junk mailers can collect all of the email addresses in that format with a computer program that automatically visits web sites to gather email addresses.

About eight years ago, we obtained a "virtual" addressing system in which people could send email to anyname@ourdomain.com and we used that to help identify email from different parts of our web site or from different constituents. But the spam mailers have gathered all of the variations of email to our domain and we are now being flooded with junk email. In some cases we are getting as many as two dozen of the same email from the same mailer on the same day.

Many of the spam mailers are also using our email address as a return address so that they won't get buried with return mail from discontinued email addresses. (This is happening to a lot of Internet businesses.)

At one time we were receiving in excess of 3,000 junk (spam) email messages every day and it consumed a substantial amount of our time to filter out the spam without getting rid of email from customers, subscribers, clients and professional colleagues.

We therefore modified our web pages to link interested parties to this page, which describes how to send email to us but does not make it easy for the automated software to pick up the email address.

Vern Jacobs