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It's come to my attention that some NexusFi (formerly BMT) members who have been in contact with another forum member by email or for his webinars are getting spammed by email.
Some of those members have accused NexusFi (formerly BMT) of doing the spamming, so I want to set the record straight.
1) NexusFi (formerly BMT) has never shared your email address with anyone. Never. We do not sell/rent/exchange email lists with anyone. We handle all of our own email servers. Your email address has never been disclosed to anyone by us. Our machines have never been compromised, and the email address you provided us has never been spammed by us or through any action on our part.
2) When you contact a NexusFi (formerly BMT) member via email, you expose your own email address to them. This is a decision you made.
3) Many people's computers are infected with malware. Most people don't even know what malware is, much less know how to prevent it or whether or not their computer is infected.
4) When you email someone who is infected with malware, your email address is now being shared with all kinds of other spam/malware bots, simply by "association". So even if your computer is clean, if the person who emailed is infected, then your email address is now compromised. This is because the malware is designed to scan email contacts, address books, etc, and blast emails out to any address it can find.
5) A specific example: not long ago, another forum member asked people to contact him via email, or to sign up for webinars he was presenting. I signed up once to see what was going on. Another forum member sent a mass-email to all people who had contacted him, using the cc: field instead of bcc: field, thereby exposing everyones email address. If just one person in that list was infected with malware, then the entire email list is now compromised (anyone who had contacted the other member).
6) Once your email address is compromised by one of these malware programs, it spreads and you start getting junk mail. You can't ever stop it.
What you should do:
a) Routinely check your computer for malware. Do a google search and only trust highly recommended and verifiable companies, malwarebytes is often recommended. Often times malware masquerades as malware checkers/preventers themselves. The irony.
b) Use PM's to communicate with other members when you don't want to post on the public forum, as opposed to using email. PM's come from our "[email protected]" address, and not your own email, so your email is protected.
c) If you do decide to email another NexusFi (formerly BMT) member, do not get mad at me or blame NexusFi (formerly BMT) for spamming you or violating your privacy or selling your email address. Simply not true.
I am only posting this here because I know for sure that someone on another forum member's email list was infected with malware, because the address I used to sign up for his webinar started getting spammed not long after.
BTW, I do not blame the other forum member and neither should you. Although he did indeed make a mistake to use cc: instead of bcc: when sending out a mass email, in reality there is very little you can do to prevent being spammed once you decide to start emailing other people. The other forum member's intent and heart are in the right place - to help others. This is simply a technical consequence once a decision was made to start communicating outside and away from NexusFi (formerly BMT) posts themselves. I also am not accusing the other forum member's computer of being infected with malware. His machine could be 100% clean and this still have happened when he sent that email out using cc: instead of bcc:, exposing everyones email addresses on his list. All it took was one person on that list to be infected in order to compromise everyones email address.
Think of it like this: If you are in a very large room with hundreds of people, and you shout out your credit card number, there is a chance someone in that room is going to do something bad with it. Using a cc: vs bcc: on his emails was like shouting out all of your email addresses to everyone else in the room. All it takes is one bad person (malware) in the "room", and now everyones address is compromised.
If you are in fact receiving spam mail, don't click any links. It might look financial related "hot stocks" and so forth. Don't click anything. Best thing you can do is setup a new email address on NexusFi (formerly BMT) and other sites, and stop using the old one, and then be extremely careful when you give out your email address in the future. You can trust me (NexusFi (formerly BMT)) because I have an extremely strong technical background and have put a lot of measures in place to ensure your privacy and data are safe, but you can see just how it easy it is --- even with the absolute best of intentions --- to accidentally reveal your email address to a spammer. Once again, I want to make it clear I do not believe the other forum member is a spammer. Absolutely not. If you think I am accusing him then please re-read my post, as that is not at all what I am saying.
When you signup on NexusFi (formerly BMT) and give us your email address, here is what we use it for:
a) Sending you private messages
b) Sending you thread notifications
c) Sending you announcements like webinars, training, contests, or other site-related stuff
d) Sending you updates about downloads (indicators)
Any/all of the above you can easily "opt-out" of or unsubscribe to.
In fact, two custom modules were written for NexusFi (formerly BMT) just to ensure that you only receive emails that you absolutely want to receive.
1) every 180 days, if you haven't logged in, we automatically send you an email saying "we aren't going to email you ever again, unless you log on again". So if you aren't using the site, then we automatically stop emailing you.
2) all "announcement" type emails have an unsubscribe link at the bottom. It's a one-click unsubscribe. You don't even need to sign in to NexusFi (formerly BMT) or remember your username and password.
When NexusFi (formerly BMT) sends you an email, it comes from one of two addresses:
1) [email protected]. This address is for 99.999% of all email coming from NexusFi (formerly BMT). It is for items a,b and d from the first list above. Sometimes for item c too.
2) [email protected]. We put on three or four webinars a month and send you an email letting you know about them a day or two before they happen.
Let's say your a user "Bob" and you want to contact another user "John" and talk about trading. When you use the private message system on NexusFi (formerly BMT), your email address is hidden and protected. Of course, if you give John your email address, then he has it. Duh.
Lets say you gave him your address. John is a good guy, and a good trader, and you like him. You've exchanged some emails. Now all the sudden you start getting spam mail.
You've only used this address for NexusFi (formerly BMT) related stuff, so you instantly think NexusFi (formerly BMT) is to blame! We've sold your email address or something bad! Nope. John was probably infected with malware. John didn't do it on purpose, I'm sure. He just didn't know any better.
What you can do is just add +unique to the address, so that when you sign up with places you could instantly create a unique email just for that place. Example:
etc etc. It works on the fly. If you have a gmail account, you can send yourself an email right now. [email protected] will work.
Now what this lets you do is easily cut off access to a certain address if you start getting spam to it. You could create a gmail filter to delete any email to [email protected] for instance, if that address starts receiving spam. Then just go on to ebay and update your profile with a new address, [email protected], and so on.
The one downside to this is spam programs are getting smarter. Since this is so universal, all a spam program has to do is look at any address ending in @gmail.com, then filter out anything after the + sign, and it has your base address. But 99.9999% of spam hasn't done this yet (not smart enough yet), so for now, this works well.
BTW, if you want my advice, gmail is the best. Yahoo has a similar approach, but Yahoo really, really sucks and shows no sign of improving. Speaking from experience, NexusFi (formerly BMT) sends hundreds of thousands of emails out per month (think of all the thread updates, etc) and Yahoo mail is constantly the only domain who is always overloaded and delays our messages. No other domain ever gives us any problem. Stay away from Yahoo if you possibly can.
Last, please be extremely careful when searching for a "malware scanner". The two above are safe and can be trusted.
The truth is, a HUGE amount of malware actually masquerades as a "malware scanner"!! Irony. For instance, you may see a pop-up "YOUR PC IS INFECTED, CLICK HERE FOR A FREE SCAN!!!" when visiting some website who allow such stupid ads (not NexusFi (formerly BMT)). When you click, you actually are installing malware on your system.
I use 10 different e-mail accounts, and out of these the only one which I can recommend without any hesitations is the gmail account. I did not want to have a gmail account first, because I am not a friend of companies like Google and they are doing lots of things, which I do not like and which come close to being illegal (such as not respecting copyright laws).
However, my gmail accounts work like a charm without any problems, and I have not found an alternative.
Yahoo really sucks, lots of important mails are filtered out, attachements (such as zip or cs files) do not pass. The live and hotmail accounts are doing alright, but I cannot access them via IMAP, something which I absolutely need, as I access my accounts from various machines. I was dissatisfied with AOL as well, and I don't even start talking about my German providers, which are just good for a laugh.
To protect myself against spyware, I am running Microsoft Security Essentials, Avira AntiVir Personal and Spybot in parallel. All three programs have real-time scanning capabilities and peacefully coexist on my machines. From time to time I run a scan with Malwarebytes and other security programs, but those scans are started manually.
Iīm using G-Data which has a very high detection rate but gives falsa alarms too. But if you are not sure if a file is infected you can send it to: VirusTotal - Free Online Virus, Malware and URL Scanner
and let it scan there using different anti-virus programs.
