Are There Any Other Ways To Avoid Spam?

The best way to avoid spam is to make sure that no one but people on your "white list" has your email address. Your "white list" are the people that you want to hear from such as your family, friends, collegues, busniess contacts, etc. Make sure that the people on your "white list' aren't the type to give out their contact email addresses to solicitors.

While Online:

• Never enter your email address in an online form if you have any doubts about its legitimacy.
• Never sign up for mailing lists or opt-in lists with your real email address. Even if these mailing lists are legitimate, they are juicy targets for spammers.
• Never give out your email address in any manner to people you don't know or trust. If you're in a bind, give out a disposable or fake email address instead.

If You Run a Website:

• Do not list your email address anywhere on the page in a "mailto:" link as spam software is designed to look for these addresses.
• If you need to provide a contact email address, create an email account that you will expect to receive spam to, and list that one.
• There is a JavaScript called Escrambler that you can add to your pages to generate a mailto: on the fly (invisible to spiders).
• Be careful when adding form mailer scripts to your pages as they often have security holes that can allow spammers to find the recipient email address. Some of these scripts such as earlier versions of formmail.pl have security holes that allow spammers to change the destination email address and send out spam using your online form script and mail server.
• Create an email trap to snare spammer's spider software. To do this, simple create an email account such as "blank@yourdomain.com" and add a "mailto:" link to it somewhere in your webpage. When a spider encounters this "mailto:" it will record and later attempt to send spam to it. Since you are expecting nothing but spam to this email account, simply route anything you receive directly to the garbage.
• Use spider poison to trap a spider on your page, making it useless and unable to report back. This poisoning technique will only work with simpleminded spiders. Add a link on your page back to itself. Since spiders follow all links found on the pages it searches, it will hit this link and go into an infinite loop - continuously returning to your page.
• Use Spam Vaccine over your entire site. It will encode any email addresses it finds and protect them from spiders.