I use my Yahoo account for all my emails, personal and professional. Since it appears on public view on this forum and a couple of other websites, I get a certain amount of spam (it varies between 2-3 and 10 or more a day). I don't really find this too troublesome. I can tell what's spam from the sender and subject field, so I just delete them without even opening the messages.

They're usually from a different sender every time, although sometimes I get 3 or 4 in a row from the same sender or from different usernames but with similar titles. This doesn't usually go on for more than a couple of days in any given case. I assume that since I don't open the messages, they don't pick up that my email address is still in use, so they give up.

However, last week between Tuesday (5/8/08) and Friday morning (8/8/08) I received 12 emails from sender "Daily Top 10", all with the identical subject heading "CNN.com Daily Top 10", all size 17-18KB. They came at roughly equal intervals, 3-4 per day. Then part-way through Friday they stopped, and I started getting emails instead from sender "CNN Alerts", subject heading "CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert", these ones size 4KB. Again, they are all identical as far as I can tell without opening them. I received 5 of these on Friday pm, 5 more on Saturday, and 7 today.

Any thoughts? Should I open them to see what they are, or hope they'll just stop of their own accord? They seem to be increasing, if anything.

If they don't stop, but I just keep sending them to my Trash folder without opening them, can they do any harm?

Don't publish your address anywhere online, you'll get spam to it if you do tinners. You might like to try Yahoo's AddressGuard disposable email addresses - if you start getting spammed at any one of them, you just throw it away.

I think you're safe opening spam within Yahoo because remote images are blocked so you won't get caught by the 1px square images which are often embedded in them - these let the spammers know that they've hit a live address. But why bother? Just delete them as soon as they arrive.

I get virtually no spam to my Yahoo address and I've had it for 7.5 years - perhaps I'm just lucky?

I don't think it's luck, Andy: it's just a question of priorities. I've had the same Yahoo address for 7 years, I don't remember getting a single piece of spam for the first 4 years but I never published my address online back then.

I want my address to be online so people can find me easily if they want to contact me about something I've written (or even offer me money for writing something new ). I'd rather delete a few spam emails a day than start faffing around with disposable email addresses. I don't think the spam does any harm as long as I don't open it, I've just been surprised by these "CNN" ones because I've never been bombarded so continuously from a single source before.

That's the simplest way I would have thought Reiner. Some people use the words AT and DOT but spammers are probably wise to that by now.

On the site which I run I use Javascript to construct email addresses from the hexadecimal equivalents of characters - I doubt any spammer's robot is going to crack that! I offered to tell the BMIC how to do this, since they publish large numbers of unencrypted email addresses on their site - including one of mine which started getting deluged with so much spam that it became unusable. As a result I had to change to another address, which was a pain. However they weren't technically competent enough to encrypt the addresses, so I had to tell them to remove mine from their site.

I know, I got one headed "Critics laud new English National Opera Production - Book Now".

Yes, I've now heard from at least one other person off-board who has been getting these for the last week. They do seem to be unusually persistent.

I haven't opened any of the emails, but I've had three or possibly four Norton alerts in the last 24 hours to say it's blocked an attempted attack on my machine, and I can't help wondering if that's connected and if the "CNN" people have somehow identified my location.

I've been getting them too and I have more than one email account.  They're on all of them - along with sales of fake Rolexes, all sorts of lengtheners and enhancers I couldn't possibly need, encouragement to make my lover scream in ecstasy and invitations to see Angelina Jolie in the nude. YUCK!  

They're always all in my bulk folder.  I never EVER open any of them and only have a cursory glance down the addresses in case anything has been put in there by mistake.  The minutes of the AGM for the Parents' Evening was in there once so I have to check unfortunately.  Some of the titles are really gross and obscene.