On 14 Aug 2003 05:26:47 -0700, (Dave Ficken)
wrote:

In spite of all my efforts to stay virus free, I had a major crash the
other day (wiped the hard drive) thanks to my 11 year old son deciding
that it would be ok to install Yahoo instant messenger on my computer
without my permission. Apparently, this is quite a large back door for
trojans, etc. I'm back up and running with a cloned copy of the hard
drive (thank you Norton Ghost), however, it had been several
weeks.....err....months since I updated the cloned copy. Therefore, I
lost all my recent email. There were a couple of people who were in
the middle of transactions or inquiries with me. I currently have no
way of contacting them as I do not have their emails on file any
longer. If this pertains to you, please resend your correspondences to
"sales at mermac dot com".
Which brings us to my change of email address. Please use "sales at
mermac dot com" , not "dave at mermac dot com"
I've discovered that most of my spam is a result of having had the
dave at mermac dot com address posted on my website for several years.
I've been experimenting with using the "dontspamme at mermac dot com"
address for posting (it is a valid email addy). To date, it has not
received a single spam email.
Not sure if that means the spam bots aren't harvesting addresses from
the group, or if it gets kicked out as a munged address by the spam
bots. In any event, it seems to be working.

Regards,
Dave Ficken
Meridian Machinery
http://www.mermac.com

Dave, with the price of computers being at an all time low, might I
suggest buying either a family machine, or a new one for yourself and
letting the family have the old one? A simple and very cheap switch will
allow you to network them together if you so desire.

I had the same problem, running full security, and while I was gone on
the road during the week, the wife and son were turning the security off
as it was interfering with their gaming and downloading...which caused
me to loose my entire system no long ago.

I forced boy child to purchase his own 600 mhz machine, used, for $100,
and he and his mom could do as they saw fit, while I retained all my
security. They have had a lot of reloading to do since then, as they
both simply wind up being the test bed for the latest virus/trojan/worm
to raise its head, but the rest of the network is quite safe and sound.
And password protected G

Gunner

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty
is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
-- Ben Franklin