Hi lk2008!
Firstly, welcome to Skincell!
Secondly, I can assure you that Skincell does not condone or support spamming, or other non family-friendly content whatsoever.
Unfortunately, as I am sure you are aware, the Internet has plenty of bad guys, as well as plenty of good, honest people.
One of the things that the bad guys do is to "harvest" e-mails. Here on Skincell, we have a policy of removing ANY e-mail addresses from the forum message boards to prevent the bad guys from "harvesting" the e-mail address. It can be frighteningly quick. For example, a few months ago I posted something, and within 5 minutes, it was on a popular search engine as the #1 hit. It can also be a very slow process, taking a few weeks. As well as "harvesting" programs, there are also programs that try to "guess" e-mail addresses. These are quite clever, and like the harvester program can be very quick. Some of them can send a couple of hundred e-mails every second.
As a moderating team, we perform lots of checks on everyone who registers, and in recent months, there have been a substatial amount of bogus / spammers attempting to register. Occasionally, though, spammers do slip through the net. We're only human, and we do sometimes make mistakes.
Now, as you know, your e-mail address on your profile is hidden. Even if it wasn't, though, the general public (including search engines, and all the random joes, bad guys and so on) still won't be able to see it, as they can't access profiles without one of their own (log out and try it..) Because of these two levels of protection, it is extremely unlikely (if not impossible) for someone to "steal" your e-mail address from us, and we certainly don't sell or give them away. Unfortunately, it is the case that not every website has similar levels of protection.
Kindest Regards,
Matt C.
