The best way to avoid spam is not getting on spammers' lists in the first place. Using your real, primary email address anywhere on the Web puts it at risk of being picked up by spammers. When you sign up for something on the Web, there is often some innocent-looking text at the end of the form saying something like: "YES, I want to be contacted by select third parties concerning products I might be interested in." Always avoid using simple names in email addresses (example: me@domain.com). Spammers can easily guess such an adress. Solution is to use complicated names for your emails (example: name.surname@domain.com). Watch out from computer viruses. Virus or worm programmers cooperate with spam senders. If a virus has got into a computer it'll scan your address book or web cached email addresses. The best way to prevent this is to keep your email client program patched and virus program updated. If you must place an email on your web site, use a picture that has the address drawn onto it, no just plain text. This way spam-bots (programs that look through web page's code) will only see a picture, not the address itself. The same is when posting something online - do not use the '@' simbol in messages (john.doe@domain.com) but use other format (john.doe [at] domain.com) (http://email.about.com/od/spamandgettingridofit/tp/most_effective.htm ; http://email.about.com/od/spamandgettingridofit/a/spam_finds_you.htm ).