I was pretty proud of my gmail account. It was fast, it was free to use and most of all it was free of SPAM.

However, a few months ago my inbox began to fill, and by fill I mean become completely inundated with spam. I have to give Google praise in that most of the spam gets filtered out, but I now have to clear my trash of over 1000 unsolicited e-mails daily. Maybe six out of those thousand ever makes it to my inbox, but this sudden influx was enough to make me wonder where it was coming from.

A simple search for my e-mail address on Google brought up four results. One of the results linked me back to a post I made in a Google Group. Unbeknownst to me this group happened to be a Usenet Newsgroup, a term that wouldn’t have raised any red flags for me. It’s just one of the oldest community systems on the Internet right?

When I joined these communities a year ago and began offering helpful tips and answers topics concerning Adobe Photoshop, CSS, and web design everything seemed merry and bright. I’d like to assume I would have noticed any particular warnings about my address’ potential abuse while posting, especially the likes of those displayed whenever you try to post something now. However, in my ignorance I continued to post.

Unfortunately, because I was creating this post through my gmail account, my full email address was used as the default author and any time you are communicating on a Usenet Newsgroup this information is freely traded amongst other users emails, message boards and a slew of other vehicles for transmitting the information. Essentially putting my precious address in a shop window for E-mail harvesters.

I soon realized that the other three results were just other message boards that picked up this particular Usenet group, displaying my information at multiple addresses.

I’m usually particularly savvy when it comes to protecting my address and I don’t recall seeing any warnings that this was a possibility. I only wanted to contribute to a community of designers. I’ll not-so-gladly take the blame. To make matters worse, somehow my address was used as the default username, so like a bonehead even where Google might have tried to protect me, I made myself openly vulnerable.

Moral to the story? Read the fine print…

The group you are posting to is a Usenet group. Messages posted to this group will make your email address visible to anyone on the Internet.
“2. What is a Usenet Newsgroup?

Usenet refers to the distributed online bulletin board system begun in 1979 at Duke University. Usenet users can post messages in newsgroups that can be read or contributed to by anyone with access to the Internet and special newsreader software. Over the years, the number of newsgroups has grown to the thousands, hosted all over the world and covering every conceivable topic.

Google Groups contains the world’s most comprehensive archive of postings to Usenet, dating back to 1981. Google Groups eliminates the need for newsreading software and lets you search this archive in the same way you would search HTML pages on the Internet. You can also use Google Groups to post your own comments to an existing Usenet newsgroup.“

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Is my email address visible on the web when I post to a group?
When your message is posted to a group, Google Groups masks your email address on the web to prevent automated computer programs from harvesting it for spamming purposes. When you see an email address in a message on the Google Groups webpages, it will look something like “add…@example.com” instead of “address@example.com.”

Please note, this masking only occurs on the web. If your message leaves Google Groups, your email address will be visible. Messages leave Google Groups in two ways:

• You post a message to a Google Group where members receive messages via email. Only the group members will see your email address.
• You post a message to a Usenet newsgroup. If you post to a Usenet newsgroup (not a Google Group), your message is sent to Usenet servers all over the world, some of which are controlled or used by spammers. Spammers extract the email addresses from these messages when they arrive on their servers.