As a website owner, you will probably receive more spam than most other people you know.

The reason for this is that most of us place our email address on our websites. There it sits, like a ripe plum waiting to be picked by any spambot that happens by. before you know it, you're on every spam email list from here to Vladistock.

Your first line of defense is to avoid posting your email address anywhere on your website. It's much better to use a web form which doesn't display your address on the page or in the source code. If you'd like to set up such a form, we can design one for you for a very reasonable fee.

One very good way to provide your email address to site visitors without divulging it to spam bots is to obfuscate the email address using java script. A nifty little tool for generating the java script is found HERE.

Another good idea is to put your email address on the site, but as an image, not as text. Spam bots can't read images.

When ordering , or subscribing to, anything online - use a throw-away email address NOT ASSOCIATED WITH YOUR DOMAIN. There are a plenty of free email services (Hotmail, yahoo, etc.) on the web. Get a free account and use it

Be very careful with your email address.

You may think that because your email address has already been on your site for several years that it's a bit too late for prevention. Think again! It can always get worse, and you'll want to minimize how bad it gets. We know one gentleman who receives in excess of 1000 spams per hour. Although he owns what would otherwise be a valuable domain name, he's at the point of letting it go because the spam problem has become so horrendous.

Prevention, even at this late hour, is always a good idea.