Demon now offer a service called Brightmail to filter spam email. It is possible to opt out of this, but by default all Demon customers are opted in. This should prevent most, but not all, spam messages from reaching you. For further details, see: http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/technicallibrary/faq/email/. However you can still expect to receive some spam if your email address is known to other people. The best advice is probably to be philosophical about it and simply to delete it.

However, it may help to use a different email name (before the @) for your postings to newsgroups (and also as your email address in your browser). A name such as news@... will assist in distinguishing responses to your articles from the rest of the email you receive. You may also wish to consider using a special address for news replies (such as replies@...) which you can set as the Reply-To: address in your newsreader. This will be picked up automatically by the software of those who may wish to respond to you by email.

Replies sent to these special addresses can then be directed to a separate mailbox for reading and/or deletion in software such as Turnpike, or you can set up other email routeing to deal with them in a way that causes you no annoyance.

Note that Demon require that you accept email addressed to you as postmaster@ and (if you have Web pages hosted by Demon) webmaster@

Remember that you can change the email name you use on Usenet from time to time. You may well not wish to change your "private" email name used by friends at all, so using a special email name for news is best done from the time of your very first post to Usenet.

You may have noticed that some people falsify their address when posting news, maybe using something like john@jhall.demon.co.ukx. They hope that this will fool automatic address-extracting software, whilst any person wishing to reply to them by email will notice the error in the address and be able to correct it. However, there are several problems with this, and we do not recommend it:

• The falsified address could be the address of some other person on the Net, who will not be best pleased at getting email intended for you.
• Even if a genuine respondent notices what you have done, you still cause inconvenience, while if they don't notice you will fail to get replies.
• It is a breach of Demon's AUP to post articles with headers which would mislead recipients into believing that some other system or user had created the articles.

Another possibility is to set your From: address to use the domain nospam.demon.co.uk (e.g. someone@nospam.demon.co.uk). Demon have stated that this domain will not be allocated to any future customer, and therefore using it in this way should be OK. Don't use this domain for email, of course, and if you do use it for news posts, remember that replies to your From: address will be lost forever. For that reason we advise you also to use a valid Reply-To: address, e.g. newsreply@yourhost.demon.co.uk - otherwise you will lose personal email replies (and not just junk) that you might welcome.