Many thanks for the replies. While I can understand there being more than one reason for the spam, one thing stands out: Many of the spam emails (certainly many with the viruses) had fake senders' adresses from this board. That would mean at least one or the other of two things: 1. someone who has those email addresses in a program such as Outlook, on his computer, has a virus on his machine, prompting the program to send out virus bearing messages, and/or 2) whoever harvests email addresses for sending spam certainly harvests some from this board. I wonder if things would improve, for example by automatically changing the @ sign to # or * so that web crawlers would miss the email addresses of posters, if the second case is also true. Just a thought, as I most definitely appreciate the work that has gone into this web site.