The #1 question we get from folks is always about email spam!  Without a doubt it is the greatest woe of email users.  Below, in italics, is a quote from Jim Sewell, a forum moderator with Total Choice Web Hosting Services (TCH is the provider of LongviewNET's web hosting reseller services).  We found this quote to be very valuable and helpful in understanding and fighting spam.  Most of the suggestions in this quote we automatically implement on every web site that we do whose hosting is provided through our reseller account.

Spam is a problem for everyone. Some have more than others but it affects everyone. Here are some things to help with spam.

Visibility:

If you are visible, they will spam you hard. By visible I mean that the spammers who scan the internet looking for victims can see you. The best and most reliable way to get flooded with spam is to post your email address in plain text on your website. The search engines have programs called spiders that search for information on the Internet. The spammers have similar programs that are out there looking for email addresses. Of course, there are other places you can get your email address "scraped" up from including:

Dishonorable websites - "Sign up for a free newsletter." and if the host is dishonest he could sell your email address to a spammer.

Emails - If you send email to someone who posts it on the internet then you're sunk. (see next)

Discussion groups - There are many discussion groups that post messages on websites. If the group is an email group then you will surely get your email listed. Even if it is a website group, be careful that you nor anyone you know ever put your email "out in the open."

Solution:

There is none. Seriously, there is no solution to spam. I can, however, give you some help on keeping it from being the biggest problem in your life.

1. Never put your email address where it will end up on the internet.
2. Have a reserved email address you never use to sign up for things or give to websites. I may have Jim@MyTCHDomain.com that I only give to my close personal friends, for instance. This is your last line of defense, guard it like you would your credit card number.
3. Set your "Default Address" in Cpanel to ":fail: no such address here." This will block a LOT of spam. Spammers can see a domain and they will start guessing at names to spam - webmaster, web, administrator, etc. If you set the Default Address to your reserved address then you will get all of these garbage address emails. I recommend not using webmaster as an address, even though it's a commonly used one. At the church and at the daycare websites I maintain I have created addresses of office@theirTCHdomain.com for folks to email and webmaster goes straight into the trash. If you develop for other people consider webdesign@ or designer@ or some other non-typical email address for people to contact you.
4. Create other email accounts for everyday use. It's easy to do at TCH because of the way our domains are set up. Just go into your Cpanel by following the instructions in your sign-up email, find the Email section and look for Forwarders. When you click that you can Add a new forwarder.
   
   Let's say I'm going to sign up for automatic billing notices from my phone company. Before I sign up with them I can go to my Cpanel and add "BellSouth@MyTCHDomain.com" and have it forward to my reserved address - Jim. When I sign up I tell them my email address is BellSouth@MyTCHDomain.com and I'll get all the messages but they won't have my secret/reserved address. If I decide later to not do the online thing I just simply go back into my Cpanel and tell it to stop forwarding BellSouth@MyTCHDomain.com and it disappears.
   
   If you go to a "Free music" site or something less legit than the phone company (I don't believe I just said that!) then you can delete the forwarder when they start spamming you.
   
   Remember, if you never give out your reserved address to anyone but your closest and most trusted friends you can cut the spam down to .0001% in a few minutes by killing all the forwarders. Why not to 0%? Someone will always guess it eventually by trying a, aa, aaa,ab, aba, abb, etc - eventually they'll get your real address but these are so few that you'll probably never notice.
5. Create a spam-magnet account. I have spam@MyTCHDomain.com that I use for any site that I sign up on that has to send me an activation password or link. An example is a game forum I recently joined. Before going to the game site I went to Cpanel and set my spam account to forward to the reserved address. I then went to the forum, signed up, read the activation email and then reset the spam address to not forward.
6. Hide your email addresses that have to be put on your websites. There are ways to cloak yourself from these scanning programs. One is to put your email on the page as a graphic file. This is unreadable by the scanners but it also requires that someone wanting to contact you has to retype your address. They may even type it wrong so you'll never get the email.

You can also use a JavaScript piece of code like this one:

<script language="JavaScript">
<!-- Begin
user = "name";
domain = "YourTCHDomain.com";
document.write('<a href=\"mailto:' + user + '@' + domain + '\">');
document.write(user + '@' + domain + '</a>');
// End -->
</script>

The advantage of this is that it is not compiled into the full address of name@YourTCHDomain.com until it gets into your browser and most of these scanners are not smart enough to read JavaScript yet. I suspect it's only a matter of time though.

A final way to get email feedback that is 99% safe from spammers is the Feedback Form. Using PHP or some other scripting language and HTML forms you can give the visitor boxes to enter information into and the web site server will compile it into an email to you - the visitor never sees your email address, nor does the spammer.

Added 6/21 after suggestion by Surefire:
Once an account gets flooded with emails is there anything you can do? Early on I saw that when you remove an email address from public view then it takes a few weeks but the spam drops off. Today, however, with so much selling and reselling of address lists it is pretty much impossible to salvage that address as a usable one... thus the reason of having a "cloaked" address that public ones forward to. You can throw away a compromised account and still have your main one. It does get complicated, however, when your email is part of your corporate branding - you almost have to rely on filters at that point.

Jim Sewell
Forum Moderator
TotalChoice Hosting, L.L.C.

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