G'Day and Welcome. 

My name is Brent Milne, I live in South Australia and have been active online since 1998.

My first serious website is still online at Personal Wealth and I really haven't done much with it since then.  This was the original source of the never ending and constantly increasing flood of spam emails that prompted the creation of this site.  I, in my ignorance, posted my email address in plain text on all my pages.

Don't do that, OK?  Big mistake, this one act has generated more than 10,000 emails per year since then at least.  I have tried the path of filtering and am skilled in creating filters for a number of well known email clients.  What I found very fast was that black list filtering is a zero sum game.  The spammers are very quick to recognise when their emails are not being delivered and all they have to do is change a couple of small things to bypass the filtering and resume the delivery.

Consider this, if you want to filter all emails containing the letters xxx you will have to make sure you actually filter for <space>xxx<space> or you will accidentally catch things like 28xxx, 28Cxxx, 28BVxxx, 28HCxxx, 28PCxxx, 28LVxxx, 24Wxx, 25xxx, 32Cxxx, 35Cxxx which are all valid families of ICs.  There are many other examples of poorly designed filters.

So how would a spammer get around this filter?  How about they write something like this "We have the absolute best R-Rated, XxX- Por.n movies".  This will bypass an xxx , XXX , porn, Porn filter.  And yet it reads clumsy but OK by human eyes.  See what I mean by a zero sum game?  You can't win that one.  You cannot even build a program that is smart enough to identify what is a modified banned word and what, in the context of the email, is OK.

My solution is this site.  My approach is that it is far, far easier and more accurate to filter based on a white list of known good email addresses.  The people who you want to get email from probably won't change their email address every time they send you an email.  Spammers do.  Sometimes the people on your friends list will use words like free, new, wow, girls, boys etc. All of these and many others could/would be on a black list but would pick up legitimate emails.  A major problem is to allow good email while killing off the junk.  That's why my system is different.  That's why I built this and it works.

So, why should you trust me with your email details?  Actually, you don't.  I only have access to the one email address you use for registering, none of the others. Technically, if you aren't a registered user, once the script runs and your email details are sent to the email server they are gone from this site.  All that comes back to this site is the response from your email servers.  If you refresh the main page you will get your details, other than password, back but that's a browser and cache issue.

If you are a registered user you still have no obligation to store any of your email details on this site.  Registering will keep a list of your declared friend emails, encrypted in a form which is not reversable.  To check if they are on your friends list I have to encrypt them before doing the comparison.  I don't want any potential spammer getting access to a database of email addresses so I must make the database secure and the data encrypted.  Clearly I cannot give you any details about what or how I have done this, just remember that my details are also in this database and I want to protect them as well.

If you want to ask me questions, please do but first check the F.A.Q. page first and bear in mind that the questions I get asked end up on the F.A.Q page.

The link to email me from is on the FAQ page.