As a general rule of thumb, beware of any offer that sounds too good to be true. This applies to products being offered on Internet and especially to any unsolicited offer or spam you receive in your email. Many of these are scams.

The term "spam", in case you don't know, refers to any unsolicited bulk email. If it's not addressed to you, or you don't recognize sender, or you're being asked to buy something or pass along questionable information, then that's spam. My advise is to "can spam" by immediately deleting any email you receive from anyone you don't know.

The best way to avoid spam, is to be very careful about who you give your email address to. My advise here is to set up a free email account and to give this email address to anyone you don't absolutely trust with your personal information. It almost never does any good to fight back against spam. Your best course of action is just to delete any unwanted email.

A trick that has been pretty successful for me is to set up an email rule (or filter) that automatically sends any mail not addressed to me to a special folder. Most of this is spam and can be easily disposed of.

Another reason to put an email address directly on your web page is for people to request information via autoresponder. These allow your visitors to click a simple mailto link and get your promotional materials or articles in their email inbox.

The problem with directly including your email addresses on your page is spam harvesters. These a programs created by scum and run by ignorant or unethical fools. What they do is search through internet, looking at web sites and pages for email addresses to add to those million email address collections that you see advertised (mostly in spam) all over place.

There is really no ironclad way to prevent these bottom-feeders from scanning your web site for email addresses. There are a number of techniques, however, to make it a little more difficult for them.