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

One of my brothers pulls the same stuff all the time. The solution was
to install a removable hard disk rack, With everyone installing their
OS on their drive, and plugging in their drive tray before booting.
That way your son would be trashing his own system, instead of
yours.Cost would be right around $100 plus an extra hard disk.

Chris