I do get some, but I'm sure not getting fat on it. I receive a couple of hundred or so emails a day so I'm not surprised that I get a few offers for credit cards I don't need and junk I'm not going to buy.

Although I probably average only a dozen or so letters a day in big metal box at end of drive,some days more that half of that mail is junkmail.

While I find basically none of this junkmail useful to me, electronic spam is much easier to deal with. I'm brand new to email and I still know at least three ways to hit delete! And, if need be, I can let my ISP gobble it up.

Since I live in country and I no longer have to pay garbage man to haul away paper junkmail, I don't even resent that as I once did. In fact, I hear that I have a neighbor who actually solicits stuff as he heats his house with it. An idea, I suppose?

I can almost hear you saying "Wait a minute! You said you get hundreds of emails a day." Yes, indeed I do. I would say that 96% of them are from ezines that I've subcribed to, offers I asked for more information about or email courses I wanted.

In my 3 months on Internet, I've subscribed to over 400 ezines. Am I nuts, as an ezine editor friend of mine implied? No, I'm out here to get information. The only way to do that is to go to where source is. Many ezines are wonderful sources of a wide variety of information.

Unfortunately, I've found that not all ezines are entertaining or informative. Do I read them all? Yes, I do, to a point. I use an automatic 'shelving' system in Outlook Express for my ezines.

But lately it's got out of control. Over half of my email is now spam, and it's growing by week.

Spam is now such a problem that I know people who have had to close down their domain name. This article offers some tips on how to avoid being buried under a mountain of spam.

--------------------------------------------- How Do They Get Your Address? ---------------------------------------------

In old days, spammers got their addresses mainly from Newsgroups - if you didn't post to Newsgroups, you were reasonably safe. But they're now using a much more efficient method to build their lists - email harvesters.

Email harvesters are robots that roam Internet collecting email addresses from web pages. Examples are EmailSiphon, Cherry Picker, Web Weasel, Web Bandit and Email Wolf, to name just a few.

How can you protect yourself from email harvesters?

By 'munging' (mung = 'mash until no good') or cloaking your email address.

There are many ways of munging your address - easiest technique is to use HTML code for punctuation in your email address (instead of symbols).

For colon after mailto use : and for @ symbol use @ and for period use .

With this method, my email address would become: mailto:msouthon@freezineweb.com

Your email address will appear exactly as it did before, and it will still be 'clickable', but email harvesters will ignore it and move on.

There are also JavaScript's that you can insert into your web page that will make your email address visible to humans but invisible to harvesting programs. Here's one that works very well: http://pointlessprocess.com/JavaScripts/anti-spam.htm

---------------------------- How To Fight Spam ----------------------------

The most important thing is never, ever, reply to spam.

Most spam contains an innocent-looking 'remove me' email address. Do not use it. Here's why:

Spammers typically buy a CD containing a million or so email addresses, but they have no idea how many of those addresses are active. So before beginning their marketing campaign in earnest, they send out a 'test message' to entire list.

The test message contains an email address for removing yourself. When you reply to that address, it confirms to spammer that your address is active and therefore worth spamming.

Worse still, spammer may be distilling from that CD a list of confirmed active addresses that he will then sell to another spammer.

The key to dealing with spam is to report it to a 3rd party: (1) affiliate program that spammer is advertising, (2) spammer's web host, or (3) ISP spammer used to connect to Internet.

When you report spam to a 3rd party, remember to be polite - they didn't send spam and they're probably just as anti-spam as you are.

(1) Reporting to Affiliate Programs

Many spammers are affiliates advertising someone else's products or services. So look for a website address that contains an affiliate link, something like this: www.affiliateprogramdomain/841526

Then just send an email to affiliate program (abuse@affiliateprogramdomain.com), informing them that you are receiving spam from one of their affiliates.

Most affiliate programs have zero tolerance for spamming and will remove an affiliate spammer without warning.