Attn: YT&V Research Group
This message is forwarded for your interest and benefit.

Folks,

JewishGen is receiving an increasing number of complaints regarding
unsolicited mail >from a variety of organizations of potential Jewish
interest, as well as plain vanilla SPAM >from all kinds of businesses.

To help you all better understand the situation here are some pointers.

JewishGen does not ever sell or lend to any organization the e-mail
addresses or names of the subscribers to any of our lists.

The JewishGen Discussion Group is mirrored to the Usenet newsgroup
soc.genealogy.jewish and is therefore a public list. Not only are our
archives searchable by anyone with an interest, messages can be retrieved

from soc.genealogy.jewish and archived in programs such as Dejanews

<www.deja.com>

If you are subscribed to one of the SIG or Research Group mailing lists
hosted by JewishGen, be assured that these are not public but private
lists. These messages are not mirrored to anything, only subscribers to
the list may post or receive the messages. While it is true that
'outsiders' could search the SIG or Research Group archived messages, they
would have to know how to find them. Not an impossible task, if you know
where to look.

The only other way we have of protecting these lists and the e-mail
addresses of the subscribers if by relying on the integrity of the
subscribers. While some of you may believe that you are helping people by
providing their names to other lists, this is a violation of the way
JewishGen operates the private list. Please, under no circumstances
provide information >from a private list to anyone.

The most secure way of protecting lists is through passworded access,
however programs of that nature would cost us $50,000 if not more.
We do not have that kind of financial strength, nor do we have the
'volunteerpower' to set up a help desk where people can report abuse. A
good bit of this you can do on your own when you receive unsolicited mail.

First address the abuse division of the ISP >from whence the message came.
For example if it came >from XYZ.com you'd address abuse@...,
include a copy of the unsolicited mail as well as the full header and
advise abuse@... that you have received unwanted mail >from one of
their users and since this is a violation of any user agreement you would
appreciate if they would take the appropriate steps in cancelling the
account.

Second when you get SPAM messages, check to see if you have ever posted a
message to any usenet newsgroup. If you can verify that you have not and
think the message may have originated because of your address being in a
SIG or Research Group mailing list, please notify support@...
giving all the particulars.

We hope this helps you to better understand the situation on all levels.
JewishGen is concerned, but as you can see there is little we can do to
prevent your addresses >from being captured by SPAMMERS.

Carol

Carol W. Skydell, Vice President
JewishGen Operations