Hi Lisa! Why not change your email addy with GW? Did you try and have problems? If so, I can likely help with getting it changed. It is sure confusing to have one email shown when you post, and then another in your replies...I usually go to the member's page and get the email addy from there...well from the form if I click to send an email via GW, and then mail from my Hotmail. I'll be in and out today...Give me a holler if you'd like me to try and help. I 'owe' you some emails too...have not forgotten you...lol Sue

Well, I am still one of those without my personal e-mail addy listed on my member page, but can have e-mail sent to me through GW. In the past, I have had my addy listed and have had serious problems with spam mail that comes from other forums on GW. Since I post on quite a few of the other forums on GW, I found that some of them do have their fair share of spam type posts; advertising for various websites, products etc. When my e-mail addy was available for anyone to see, these posts would pop up on these other GW forums and within an hour or so I would have the spam coming to my e-mail box about the product, site etc. Once I realized where all this spam was coming from, I removed my addy from my member page, and that was the end of the spam coming from here. Hope you all understand why I no longer have my e-mail addy available to see, but as I said, you can send it through GW and I would say that 95% of the time I don't have a problem getting it. Fran

Hi, DA I'm not hiding state secrets either ! :-D But as the help forums at Gmail and Hotmail show, many people are hacked daily. (Not surprising, I suppose. Just do a search at YouTube for "Hotmail" or "Gmail" and see how many of the search results are how-to videos for hacking the accounts ! Just how many people out there are amateur hackers trying all these tricks to gain entry to someone's account ?!) Anyway, from reading the various threads, trying to get control back for an account to which one no longer has access -- esp. with a free email service ! -- can be a veritable nightmare, to put it mildly. Locked out, recovery options not working, etc. And the users are often limited to help via forums, often getting canned responses of "it's basically your own fault" even if it wasn't. Hopefully, people can convince tech support that they are, in fact, the legitimate 'owners' of the email account in question and can get it back without much trouble. But will all their email be there when they regain access ?? For others it's enough of a hassle to make them want to change providers, and even pay for better support in case it happens again. To avoid these frustrations the general advice from the 'experts' usually boils down to two items: better security upfront (strong password, difficult security question, etc.) and back ups (auto-forwarding to another account at another provider, downloading to one's email client, etc.). Like you, DA, most of my own online 'accounts' (message boards, twitter, or whatever) use a 6-8 character password that's not really all that difficult. But for my (two) email accounts I use the "nuclear launch code" method (LOL) just because I don't want to end up as so many others have, with loss of account and/or loss of all one's saved email information (messages, family photos, receipts, etc.). Fortunately, ilovedobies is at least still allowed access to the Hotmail account in question and apparently still has all saved emails, photos, etc. As you know, not all hackers (if that's the correct explanation here) are so 'kind.'

I use Windows Live Mail that gets my server mail. There are 2 ways to block it in there. I maybe get one spam a year, it usually something I have done to receive it. It is not because I blocked it. A tech from my server told me to make a unique email address and it will stop most spam. He said he didn't get any spam. A lot of people say this doesn't work but it does for me. I make an addy that only makes sense to me using an old street address number mixed in with my initials alternating numbers and letters.