I post this in response to today's CNN article on the growing junk email problem, titled Study: Spam costing companies $22 billion a year. Essentially a survey of 1,000 US adults were conducted and the results were startling.

What I found interesting was the fact that a good number of people actually read some spam messages to 'just see what they say'. This is a bad idea. Many of these emails can contain code that allows the sender to snoop on the recipient. Although there's little that can be done programmatically, it does give them an idea on who reading. Because of this, they send the viewer more. Key point: curiosity killed the cat - just delete junk mail.

Another thing that I pointed out was the fact the spammers can send mail into a domain without it needing to be addressed to an actual address. All Grabermedia accounts send this email in the trash automatically, but this can reconfigured. Look into this setting. (Cpanel/email manager/default address).

Email spiders and/or bots that troll the web looking to harvest email addresses are also a huge spam source. Computer program visit sites, harvest email addresses and leave. Those emails are put on a list and you get spam. This can be guarded against by either limiting the number of email addresses published on your site (a bad idea in my opinion) or via an excellent tool I found that encodes the addresses. Using this tool, the robots get confused and harvest nothing.

The excellent encoding tool is provided by Raleigh-based Automatic Labs and is a free service. Basically you can take the address and input it into their form and out comes the code to encode it. You place that code in your webpage. I use this tool a lot.

Basically spam sucks but there are ways to keep it in check. You'll never eliminate it.