Originally Posted by
GS SOLOMON
We understand that some of you are currently getting spam email. Spam isn't really ever going to go away, though. I get spam every day to my email account at work that slips through the myriad of filters and layers of protection that I have, from the IT folks, from my Email client, and from Gmail but I just hit the delete button on the ones that slip through and move on. I stopped stressing over it a long time ago.
Unfortunately, the fact that we allow you to have an "email address" that we and other customers can use to contact you without you needing to post your personal contact information makes it easier for spammers to spoof mail to or from you. In addition, all it takes is one or two people to get infected with malware or a virus (and trust me, more than a few of our customers are infected) and your entire address books are snagged and used by these spammers to send mail from. On top of that, most people don't realize or understand that clicking the "unsubscribe me" or "remove me from this mailing list" link you see at the bottom of a large portion of the spam you get only confirms that your email address is valid and signs you up for more spam and more lists.
A couple of weeks ago, when we moved our mail servers, we lost a layer of spam filtering that we simply cannot just "re-add" at this time. To be as effective as we'd like it to be (and as effective as *you'd* like it to be), that system will need to be reinstalled and reconfigured for the new server and that will take a large amount of time. We are currently still catching a good portion of it with the filtering we were able to keep, but some of it is simply going to get through for now. While it's unfortunate that some of you are getting anywhere from a handful to a few dozen spam emails a day, we're still blocking/preventing several hundred (if not several thousand) from getting to you. In the grand scheme of things, although we understand that it can be a little frustrating, a few extra emails isn't really that big of an issue (or shouldn't be), as it really just takes a couple of extra seconds to delete them. Having said that, for those who are getting too many to be acceptable, we do have some options and alternatives, some better than others:
1) The first and easiest thing would be for those of you who are getting spammed to uncool levels, go to the website in the "My Account" section and turn off email forwarding. This will (or should, at least) prevent anyone from outside this office from being able to send mail to you via your play.net address. That will mean, however, that other players and GMs who are attempting to email you via your play.net address will not be able to do so. In addition, honestly, it's probably not ever going to stop all spam from showing up in your inbox. It's just...not.
2) The second suggestion, and one that's just as easy but a lot more powerful, is to set up a GMail account to use for your all play.net mail. GMail has pretty strong and pretty smart filtering and will handle keeping your mail minty fresh and springtime clean without you having to do a thing (other than set it up, basically). GMail accounts are free and you can have multiples, but all you really need is one devoted to all your play.net matters. Just go make a new account and name it after your character or your account name or whatever and change your email address on record on the website to this new address and then you won't have to worry about spam, OR worry about your personal name/email addresses getting out to anyone when you're just wanting to talk about game related stuff (if that's something you worry about).
3) Choose to use a decent Email client, like Mozilla Thunderbird, that has spam filtering and spam controls built in to it. The great thing is that you can set it up to check email from a GMail account, so you can combine the two and it should solve most of your problems.
4) We are currently setting up this additional layer of filtering, but a) it won't be perfect and b) it may be all we're able to do for the next month or so, at the very least. As most of you know, we're currently in the middle of some big changes in terms of company organization and relocation.
5) We could also eliminate the Play.Net email address system entirely. That's not something we WANT to do, but honestly, that was originally what was planned to happen and I fought against it (and am still fighting against it). The fact of the matter is, I feel that too many game systems rely on these addresses and too many people (staff and players alike) utilize them for us to get rid of them, even if the concept is so very 1990s. Given the choice between a few extra emails a day showing up in your box that need to be deleted and getting rid of the entire system, the winning choice is, to me, keeping the system up and running the way it is.
Hope this helps...
Solomon
Spam to my email via play.net
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