Hi Kathy, Well I'm certainly glad to hear that not ALL "closed site" SPONSORS are taking advantage of nice people wanting to put together these closed genealogy sites. A friend and distant relative of mine was not so lucky when she started her closed genealogy site a few years ago. Her site SPONSOR sold her guests' names and addresses to a SPAM agency and the SPAM we would get was ridiculous. (There was even a piece on T.V. about the fellow who runs this SPAM agency earlier this year!) Most of it was just annoying but a fair share of it was just plain disgusting. Not the sort of stuff you'd want to download onto a family computer. Well, I needed to email another site guest one day and made a chance remark that lead to the discovery of what was going on. One of our grandsons (then 7 years old) lives with us, he was due home from school and had received an email from his half-brother. I mentioned to this person that I needed to close my email and "get the latest Porno SPAM cleaned out of my mailbox before he got home" and read his email. She wrote back saying she had a nasty SPAM problem too. We began comparing things, and realized the only on-line thing we had in common where our email addresses were concerned (besides email) was the closed site. We began asking the other site quests if they had begun having major SPAM problem since they started using the site. All said yes. When the friend (who'd started the site) addressed the SPAM issue to the site SPONSORS...she received a form message in response. It basically said that the SPONSORS and their assorted associates were allowed to use any information submitted to them....as outlined in the agreement everyone had to read before accessing the site, etc. After she tried to reply to the SPONSORS... she and all the site members found the links to her site no longer worked.....all we would get was a page saying the site we were seeking no longer existed. When my friend tried to contact the SPONSORS about THAT problem her email bounced. The message said they weren't accepting mail from her address. . We have no idea what became of all the information we'd all poured into that site over the months, but we learned to be very careful of things being offered free on the Internet. Everything has a price and I just like to know what the price is up front. As I said...I'm glad that not ALL of these site SPONSORS are taking advantage of nice people ----- Original Message ----- From: Kathy McRobie <rrobie@sbcglobal.net> To: <MDGARRET-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2003 8:19 AM Subject: Re: [MDGARRET] New website > I too belong to some myfamily sites. I have enjoyed reading what other people post. I have not had not spam from the site. You can decide for yourself if you want to recieve notification of every post, there is a check list to choose what you want delivered to your in box. I chose to have notification of new posted to my in-box because I don't want to miss a thing. There is alot of nice people that are members of the site and I am glad that i joined. <snip>