This conversation about spam resonates with me, particularly now as I try to conduct interviews with people who participate on message boards and news groups. I've found that my Usenet interviewees are quite weary of spam. Because they participate on newsgroups and their email address is publicly visible, they are often prime targets for spam. Since I've signed up to participate on Usenet and on message boards, the level of spam I've received has gone from 0 to approximately 5 a week, most of it porn. Many of the people I interview set up a seperate email account, with hotmail or yahoo, from their personal account so that they don't have to sift through spam. Others add things like "nospam" into their email address (e.g. john@smith.nospam.com). As a result of spam, people who receive my email request to be interviewed may view it as spam and disregard it. I've found that if I send my request twice, I get more responses, often with people apologizing for ignoring me the first time because they figured it was just more spam. ~Jenny Stromer-Galley Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania jstromer@asc.upenn.edu http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/jstromer