Most spam will not come to your inbox without your help, or sometimes the "help" of your ISP. I use Charter cable-- because it's the only show in town-- and their spam protection fairly sucks. But other than your Internet provider selling your email address to spammers, it's a simple fact that most people invite most of it themselves. Spammers don't have any magical way of getting your email address, they usually use information that you have provided to various sources, who in turn either sell that information, give it away to business partners, or store it on unsecure databases.

It is probably next to impossible to prevent all spam, but it is possible to limit what spam you receive, to a large extent. We won't go into a lot of the details of the methods spammers use to get your email address, since that would only serve to give more would-be spammers information. However, there are some basic things you need to know in order to protect your inbox from garbage, so we'll start there.

A spam bot is akin to search engine bots (short for robots), in that they roam the web looking for the "mailto:" links that you put on your web site. Any email address they find is then added to their database. So what can you do? You can disguise your email addresses by using one of the many PHP or JavaScript programs freely available on the web. You'll find a free script in the JavaScripts section titled "Hide Email Links from Spam Bots" on This Page that will do the job.

By far the most common way that people give away their email addresses to spammers is by filling out forms on the web. You can never assume that the website you are handing out your email address to will not disclose it, or in many cases, sell it outright. One way to protect yourself is to get one of the free web based email accounts from a site like Yahoo, and always use that address when filling out forms. You will have to go to that account and delete all the trash from time to time, but at least the crud will all be in one place, and not mixed in with your personal email.

Considering the above, here are a few things to be wary of:

• Buying things online
• Registering software or hardware
• Joining forums, newsgroups, taking newsletters
• Most "free" e-card sites make their money by selling not only your email address, but also those of your friends
• Registering with singles and dating websites
• Participating in polls or feedbacks, even with the major news web sites

I know that the points just mentioned are pretty limiting, but if you don't want to wade through tons of spam every day, they must be considered. If you follow the guidelines your spam will diminish, but there is no way to be 100% spam-free that I know of, especially if you have your own registered domain.

If there's a really good anti-spam app out there anywhere, I haven't found it. I have tried almost a dozen different ones, and every one of them has a serious drawback, at least as far as I am concerned: they will also delete personal mail, to varying degrees. Almost all of the current anti-spam apps look for certain keywords which they use to tag your mail as spam. If you were running one of these spam filters and this article was an email that was sent to you, the chances are that you might not get it, since the content would probably cause it to be tagged as spam. If you know of one that works 100% of the time, let me know and I'll post it here.

• Tracing Spam
• C.A.U.C.E
• Securing Sendmail