June 30, 2008 
Listing your email and your physical address on your website is always a good idea. It creates credibility because it somewhat shows there's a real person behind the site.
But showing your email address is one of the best and fastest ways to get on spammers' lists. They use software to scrape email addresses on websites and use them to send tons of spam and to sell them to other spammers.
I experienced this myself years ago. So, like many others, I start using a form instead of listing my email address. That form is written in PHP. Which means you can't see to which email address the information is sent.
Ha, that worked great! I found the solution to avoid my email address being scraped.
So I answered all questions and solved some problems that came in through the form. I want to do that as fast as I can, because these people trust me with their questions and problems. I want to help them as soon as possible.
Then, suddenly, the email address the form sent information to, was on a spam list too!
And it didn't stop there. I started receiving email spam at the return email addresses that I use in my list management (Aweber) too. And on my PayPal email address. On top of that, my site was jo-jobbed, meaning that some spammer uses my domain name in his broadcasts.
Now, before I continue, let me first say that I don't use a so called 'catch all' email address.
You can set that at the control panel of your hosting service. If you use a 'catch all' email address, it doesn't matter what's in front of @your domain.com (there's a deliberate space between your and domain which makes it an invalid domain name), all mail will be delivered in your email box. Using a 'catch all' email address almost certainly leads to receiving spam email.
So what I do is set up seperate email boxes like inbox@my domain.com and discard all email sent to other email addresses. This will only deliver emails sent to 'inbox@my domain.com' and throw away all emails sent to another address.
Now, when 'inbox@my domain.com' ends up on a spam list, I just create another email box like 'in-box@my domain.com', change it in the form and I'm spam free again. That's quite easy to do.
But a bigger problem is changing email addresses in your autoresponder series and your PayPal address. That's a big hassle.
So here's what I did.
I use Gmail to filter my spam messages.
Because their spam filters really are excellent.
Google says, their innovative technology to keep spam out of your inbox.
Whatevere they use, their spam filters work remarkably well. And when an occasional spam email enters your inbox, you just hit the 'Report Spam' button and it's gone.
Mind you:
Use The 'Report Spam' Button WISELY!
In other words, don't use this button to delete any emails that you have asked for. It would completely ruin the fantastic Google spam filters.
Setting up a Gmail account to receive email for your websites is a breeze.
Just log in at your account and select Settings, followed by Account. Under Get mail from other accounts: you simply fill in the necessary data to retrieve emails from your website and voila...
you're done!
You can even add 4 more accounts.
Now you can use all Gmail features like filters and labels and benefit from their great anti spam filters.
Try it and let me know how you're doing.
Wishing you success,
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