Sierra Trading Post privacy policy states they are part of TJX. ' We may share your personal information among the TJX Businesses (which are affiliates owned by TJX, including Derailed, T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, Winners, HomeSense, and T.K. Maxx). They may use this information to offer products and services' I do buy from Sierra Trading occasionally. I get a lot of specials offered from them, deeper discounts, closeouts, free shipping.... I've never received unsolicited mail from any of the other companies they mention sharing with.

On my Gmail account, I get hardly any spam. However, I still use my AOL account, not sure why, and there I get so many that it's just amazing. I regularly get the ones from Amaz Customer Service locking my account, Bank of America ( which I love because I have never ever had an account there ). I have gotten that one for McAfee and Norton I think with my $599 charge pending. Some of them are so good that I actually shudder for a moment. There was a really good youtube about how good these scams are getting, where they use an upper case letter I to be a lower case L for example, and you don't really see that it's not right. here you go

Maddielee, the spammer doesn't take over. A thread is resurrected with a vague post like "I have something like that, it's good" or whatever vague meaningless statement. Then the spammer comes back and edits the post to add a spam link. The limit to edit posts is one week. It takes at least two flags to make spam disappear. Spam links might be links to real companies who have chosen disreputable agents to do their advertising, but a lot more seem to be from Eastern European counties linking to malicious websites, trying to get your info to sell, selling inferior and mis-advertised products, and other bad stuff. My objections are 1) identifying the bad guys, 2) keeping the site clean so you can trust a link from a known member, 3) (not that I have a great love for Houzz or anything) it cheapens their site and turns away people who come here for real info and have to wade through lots of junk. Lucille, I concentrate on posts made by someone who just registered. I have never had a problem with someone recommending a service or product, unless they own the company. If someone says "Pro" I check the phone number and address by Google. Usually the bad guys have made up locations with non-existent towns and mismatched phone numbers, zip codes and the like. I once did have a real location, and auto body shop for someone claiming to be a KD business. The vague comments now seem to be more relevant somehow, and some are longer than they used to be. The ones I am watching, I either post 'following' or I 'like' the post. Both methods let me find the post days later to check for the spam edit. I try my best to delete my 'following' posts and my requests for flags as soon as the offense is removed.

I have suddenly started getting the phishing emails from Russian IPs. Most are of the "your account has been locked" variety although one was the "I have hacked your account, I saw you on the porn site...." classic. They all have huge attachments (judging from the amount of code that shows in the headers) that I fear contain malware. I always check the source of the emails and when possible, file an abuse complaint with the IP or domain name server. Doing this has cut the spam down from several a day to just 2-3 per week. But, I am not going to message the Russian entities, thinking that that would just confirm a valid address to them (since I don't know how involved they may be in the spam).