NEVER, EVER, EVER post yours or anyone else's personal email address on the forum.  This is especially true if the email address contains what is known as PII (Personal Identifying Information).  What I mean is that many email accounts use people's names or initials as part of the email address.  As an example, a user might have an email address that is [email protected].  If you post that on the forum, you just publicly told everyone that "first name" "last name" works at some company.  Even just divulging a person's name is critical.

 

Something that might be "meaningless" could be valuable to someone with malicious intent.

 

The thing is, this is a public message board that is scanned constantly.  If you scroll down you might see a "user logged on" name like "google", "bing", "yahoo" or something like that.  That user is not a person, it's a program that is running looking for data.  Some of the actual usernames could be the same thing and you would never know it.  What those programs do is go out and look for data and someone doing something malicious might be looking for patterns that resemble an email.

 

Many of those programs are collecting email addresses in order to send spam or worse, a virus to unsuspecting users.

 

In the case of the google, bing and yahoo instance, it's the search engines probably looking for keywords such as "quarterback", "coach", etc. to import into their databases.  In other instances it could be that somebody searched "Blake Bortles" and one of their link results lead them to this website.

 

The bottom line is, anything posted in the forums is open to the public and accessible by ANYONE whether they are registered users or not.  NEVER, EVER post anything that you want to keep private.

 

If you need to pass an email address, a phone number or any other PII to a mod, an admin or anyone else, always do it via a pm or by other means.

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