E-mail that is received but not requested is called "spam"; it is the electronic equivalent of junk mail. Some people say the name came from a Monty Python song "Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam…", an endless string of worthless text.If you want to create a negative image for your web site, send out spam and invite people to come to your site. Spam is a nuisance, and it clogs the bandwidth of the Internet. Use it, and your site will die!
One of the fastest ways to receive spam is to publish a web site with your email address on it. Spammers have computer programs (spambots) that search the Internet and extract email addresses found in web pages and Usenet discussion groups. They put millions of email addresses on CD and sell them to naive business people.
There are two ways to put your email address on your web pages but not receive spam.
 | Don't put your real address on your web pages. Instead, use a free email address from Yahoo! or Hotmail, and have your email forwarded to your real email address. When you start getting spam to that address, switch to another free account, and have your real email program filter and delete emails sent to your old free account. |
| There is a way to place your email address on a web page in a way that spambots can't read the address but human visitors can. This involves a Java Script and is described in http://www.joemaller.com/js-mailer.shtml Be aware that eventually spambots will probably be able to decode the Java Script. |
© Copyright 1998, 2011 Allen Leigh