My site, www.annsartgallery.com has been used now by a spammer who is sending out mass mailings of porn, viagra, stock tips, debt relief and you name it from rotating names @annsartgallery.com.

I have contacted the host and was sent to a few sites that are obviously difficult to understand (cert.org, etc) and clearly can do nothing more than waste my time.

Since my sister and I are good upstanding people in the community and do not want our site associated with such filth, we have asked the host, www.addr.com, to investigate. The host has responded very well over the weekend but the bottom line is there is probably nothing they can do.

I've used this nic online since 1992. Annsartgallery has been up since 1999 and I'm working on a revamp for an upcoming debut in the local community. I have my first book cover about to be published and the drafts are back and forth from the site on a private url.

This is a total disappointment and I've contacted congress, senate, doj and fbi about how to find the criminal individual. I suspect the spammers will hide behind technology and I will be just another statistic.

We simply will not have our names associated with porn and misleading or false advertising. We will not have our names associated with spam complaints from folks who are recipients of the emails. We will not have our names associated with in any way at all with bandwidth bandits who received the emails and chose to retaliate on our site. It is defamation of character and illegal in most countries.

I am posting this here because yesterday I received an odd IM from someone who just joined the same day. ... [Instant Message from MsStress42: I was very impressed by your progress. I always knew I'd see your work on this website eventually! Congratulations, you have truly come a long ways, you are no longer afraid of your success!] This person commented on one of my fractal images and I sent back asking who she was. No reply as of yet, but in all fairness, its too soon to say there is a problem. I don't know if it is coincidence, if an old friend joined, or if someone just decided to take issue with me.

As you know, I was outspoken in the OT thread on many issues. But too, I have to say, I joined a few yahoo news groups in the last few months. Since I joined the last group (a Terragen group) I've been receiving spam email from names at yahoo and yahoo says the emails did not originate from them, they were spoofed. Now my site is spoofed as of a few days ago.

So I do NOT think that it is an 'Osity member who has targeted me. It could easily be a web crawler program that picked up on my web site or a yahoo group.

However, the hard core reality is that I cannot fork out the bucks to fix this (and Yahoo with their bucks cannot fix it either). The best way is to change my nick (which I have had since 1992), open a new domain with a new host, and start over on a new project. If I do so, I will not go through the time and hassle to rebuild anything at all. No links. No connection to the old nic, profile, or anything else. I simply will not chance that this is a crawler verses a person who has targeted me.

If anyone has any ideas, I'm open. I've heard that changing the host might fix this because it will change the internic IP address and thereby stop the spammer until his crawler locates the site again. I've also heard that changing the host will not fix it because annsartgallery.com will be associated with the new IP (as is to be expected if anyone is to access the site). So any ideas as to how to fix this and I'm willing to put in "some" time to follow up. Any techie types that have a tip or two will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you. I'm sorry this is happening. I have changed the index page of www.annsartgallery.com to notice folks who might visit the site. So far, there has been no local (real life) community reaction to this and I'll hang in here as long as that remains true.