You are not alone! Email used to be just the perfect replacement for snailmail: direct, fast, cool. But today, spam has become so common that many citizens of cyberspace find that up to 90% of their daily emails are spam or - the technical term - "unsolicited bulk email (UBE)".
But how do these spammers get your email address anyway?
A recent study of the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) uncovered some interesting information: As you may have guessed already (especially if you have your own website) in most cases spammers find addresses for their huge collections on webpages. Of course they do not personally visit your page and copy the address to their files. They use specialised search robots similar to those the web search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) use to crawl and rank your pages. They filter email addresses out of the pages automatically and ad them to the address databases used by the spammers. Also, once in a database, addresses will often be sold to other spammers and added to more databases.
Since you are interested in reducing the spam arriving in your inbox, your address is probably out there somewhere already. So does that mean you are lost? Certainly not. There are measures to reduce the spam in your mailbox:
The best way to protect your email is to use a contact form rather than publishing your email address directly on your website. CAPCHA image verification will make your form even more spam proof, meaning that a human will have to visit your form to fill it in. Drastically reducing spam form submissions and protecting your actual email address from the spam robots.
So you need to publish your email address for potential customers, business partners, employers or friends? If you must provide a "mailto" style link rather than use a form, then use an obfuscator to hide it from the spam robots. With the use of a little JavaScript you can "obfuscate" your email address so that spammers cannot easily harvest it from your web pages with their search robots.
Click here to Obfuscate an Email Address