Spam emails from group members

2 days ago I received the following email...

no-reply no-reply@elgg.orgHide
To  
You have a new message from akiva. It reads:
 
 
    Hello,
Am Miss Akiva Ericson from USA,  I will like to talk with you
confidentially, contact me direct to my private Email (akivaze@hotmail.com)
very important
 
 
    To view your messages, click here:
 
 
    To send akiva a message, click here:
 
 
    Please do not reply to this email.
 
 
Well I clicked the elgg.org messages link to send her a message here. it said the person dont exist.
 
My question is... why is my email exposed to everyone so that they can spam me? if its not exposed, how did this person get my email address? ....Obviously I'm not responding to her email at hotmail cuz frankly I'm not interested in hearing from prince abooby of nigeria and hearing about how he needs help to get his millions from the bank. LOL Nor did I buy a spanish lottery ticket of which I'm told I've won a kazillion badillion dollars. Sorry but I didnt know how else to contact anyone here on this issue. Thanks
  • There was no spam email sent to your mail account directly from the spammer.

    Instead the following happened:

    1. The spammer registered an account here on the community site,
    2. The spammer sent you (and maybe other site members) a private message here on-site (in no way knowing your mail address),
    3. Default notification settings of the community site is to send the member an email notification if a new private message arrived on-site,
    4. You and maybe others got this notification,
    5. Spam detection (or a site member reporting the spammer) resulted in the account used for spamming with private messages was banned/deleted.
    6. When you visited the community site looking for the spam account it was already dealt with.

    Of course, it would be cool if the spammers would get identified before they spam. Unfortunately, you can only identify them reliably if they already have done something wrong. Fortunately, it happens very seldomly that the site message system is misused and members' email addresses are definitely not fetched.