Putting your email address on the web - whether it be in a forum, on your personal or business website, in a yellow pages type site or even on a free-ads site, means that it can and will be found and used byspammers. Spammers automatically ‘harvest’ email addresses from any type of website - they make automated tools that can process thousands of pages an hour - and they put these on their mailing lists and start sending out spam.

Sometimes it may seem absolutely necessary to place your email address online. This is never the case, even where you want to encourage direct communication from potential customers; there are ways around it. Read on.

You could try using a form mailer. Form mailers allow visitors to your site to enter their details into a form on your page, and then to submit this form. You will received the results in an email; happily the customer never needs to know your email address.

Encoding your email address as javascript may also help: many email harvesting programs do not recognise or read javascript, and an encoded address may stop the vast majority of collection attempts. This is not a foolproof methods, but it may help.

Representing your email address as an image in your web page will prevent it from being harvested, but it may also mean that customers find it more difficult to email you - especially the visually impaired.

There is no one perfect solution, but all of the above have been shown to help in the fight against spam.