If you are seeing this message, it is most likely because you have fewer than 5 posts on the forum. This is an anti-spam feature of this forum. Users must have a postcount of 5 or more posts before they can gain access to their Private Message mailbox to read or send PMs. This is to ensure that account holders are actual participants in the PPCMLA.

Peace,
Drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!

Seems like a decent workaround.

As long as we don't get a spate of five spam posts just so that a spammer can send PM spam.....

Agreed. Spam posts would stink. On the other hand, they aren't as invasive to you guys as spam PMs - you don't get an email when a spammer starts posting. So I'd rather have spam posts which I can delete without bothering you than have spam PMs which I cannot. Assuming I can get in and delete them on time. I'm guessing that most of these spammers are actually intelligent bots with real email addresses, so they probably can't read English and don't know they have to post 5 times before they can send PMs.

I've just now added a mod to look up email addresses at registration time against a variety of databases of known spammer associated email addresses. For the curious, this is the mod I installed:
http://temerc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=6181
(Props to Osgeld for pointing me in the direction of a stopforumspam.com mod for phpBB3. It took a little searching to find something that would work with this forum, but it was Osgeld's idea).

I just pulled an email off stopforumspam.com and tried to use it to register. The lookup seems to be working.

So between these two mitigations, the forum should be pretty spam-free again.

It really is weird that this started happening all of a sudden after the new year. The forum went for several years without any spam PMs, then all of a sudden they started really rolling in. I wonder what changed in the spammer community...

Peace,
Drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!