Recently there have been reports/posts on Realneo which contain email addresses of private persons, ie not government/public employee email addresses.   Although it is certainly appropriate to post public employee’s public contact info, or the private email of a person who is on a public board and uses that email for board correspondence,  or a private email, home address, telephone # if the owner has given permission,  please keep in mind that there are valid reasons to not post private email addresses, private home addresses, and telephone #s.    

As a long time user of Realneo I have found out that putting email addresses on the web can lead to headaches for a number of reasons. 

One reason is that email addresses are “harvested” from all  urls on the web  by bots - and then sold to/used by spammers to email out garbage which fills up the email owner’s inbox.  

I believe it is inappropriate to use Realneo (or any web site) as a searchable source where private email addresses are posted (without due consideration) where they can be collected by anyone - and then used by spammers or others anonymously. 

I hope every Realneo user  extends “Golden Rule” courtesy to everyone who has trusted you with their private email address, and doesn’t  post them on Realneo (or any other web site for that matter) unnecessarily.  If you must post an email address, you can write it without the @.   For example, you could write “Johndoe AT comcast.net” and the bots will be less likely to read it as an email

The same “Golden Rule” courtesy is true of private persons’ home addresses and private persons’ telephone numbers.  I  believe it is inappropriate to use Realneo (or any publicly accessible web site)  as a location to post person’s private home addresses or persons’ private telephone numbers.  

We all have enough headaches in our daily lives - with junk mail and telephone solicitation -without offering up to the world the private contact information of our fellow citizens. 

If you have posted any private emails or private home addresses or private telephone numbers, please consider this a request for Net Etiquette and, if you don’t believe there is some over aching,  redeeming social value to leaving the private information on line, go and edit the info out. 

I think that we will find that REALNEO RUNS BEST ON  “HIGH OCTANE” CIVILITY!

Please everyone, jump in here with your thoughts on the subject. 

Respectfully, 

Jeff Buster