Use your primary email address for important communications and get a second or third one for "public consumption".

You can reserve your primary email address for use to correspond with your relatives, close friends and business associates. There may be occasions when a secondary email address is necessary. The secondary email address comes in handy when you wish to join mailing lists, newsgroups or have to leave an email address at some website you visited which required registration.

You can obtain a secondary email address from the hundreds of free, web based email services around. In fact you can get one right now from our sister site VIAEMAIL.CC .

The point is once your email address is in a total stranger's possession, there's no telling what kind of junk or virus that may come your way pretty soon. As an aside, ever notice spammers always use these free web-based email addresses as their return address?

If you have your own website or you have to publish your email address in a web page, make sure you disguise it.

Spammers use a tool called a "harvester" to scan hundreds of thousands of websites regularly for email addresses that they can collect and add to their list of victims. It doesn't even have to be your own website, like if you post in publicly available blogs or discussion groups. This puts you in danger of being "harvested". In short, never publish your email address on a publicly accessible website.

If you are absolutely required to publish an email address in a public forum, you can add an arbitrary extension in your email address thus making it invalid when harvested. For example, "yourname@yourisp.com.nospam". By adding the ".nospam" at the end of your email address, you've rendered it pretty much non-existent so when the spammer's harvester comes around and collects your email address, they've ended up with a useless address. You can just add a note in your post that if anyone needs to reply to you to simply remove the ".nospam" part from the email address. Or post your email address in this format "yourname (at) someisp (dot) com".

A lot of states in America are beginning to pass laws that are making it harder and harder for spammers to distribute their unwanted emails. Some states require that spammers start their subject line with the word "ADV" so that recipients can easily identify their newly-received email as spam. Hopefully the rest of the world will take their legislators to task and have anti spam laws enacted so that spammers can be prosecuted in any country. If you would like more information on the fight against spam, please visit Spamcon.