It's so easy to get discouraged about spam. Even the most up-to- date filters seem to be almost useless sometimes. Spammers are constantly improving their tricks to slip their annoying ads through, disguised to make their messages enticing or at least harmless.

Nonetheless, there are a few simple tricks you can use to at least cut down on the flood, especially if you publish on the Web.

Spammers use programs called "webcrawlers" or "spiders" that constantly patrol the Web. These programs are not all bad as many search engines, such as Google, depend upon them, and there are ways of trying to limit their access. But the spiders that spammers use aggressively look for email addresses to gather. Any static public page on which your email address appears can be fair game, unless you take evasive steps. 

 Crawlers often look for the distinctive at-sign, the "@" in every email address, so the simplest way to beat them is to not put any email links on the page. Display your contact information by spelling out your email address - "joe at swcp.com", for instance. An old way to frustrate them is by putting fake info in the address that human correspondents will know to take out, like " This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it " Just be sure you're not accidentally putting in someone else’s real domain name! Or you can put your address in a graphic file which spiders can't read.

If you have a domain name of your own that you use for mail, you can easily get overwhelmed with all the spam that can attract. One way of reducing spam in that case is to set up an address used only on the webpage and use filters at high settings.

In any case, if you get mail through your own domain, tell us what addresses you wish to use. That way, we can set up aliases so that only properly addressed mail will reach its true destination.  All those messages addressed to other names which would otherwise all wind up in your inbox will be dumped into your spamfile.