Spam email is a horrible and painful problem. It is not unheard of to have hundreds of emails come into your inbox while only a handful are relevant. There are software programs that can help to combat spam and do a pretty good job of reading between the lines and stopping at least 40% of spam. However it does take setup and a bit of time to train email spam detection software.

Here is an article on SEOmoz about 5 tips to combat this email spam before it starts to happen.

A few good suggestions about how to combat email spam are:

• encrypt the email address instead of having a standard mailto:user@domain.com
• don’t have a generic email address
• use on line forms if you can there are free scripts like Matts, as well as companies offering online formmail

Unfortunately email spam seems to be here to stay and the best we can expect is to learn how to deal with, making it as difficult as possible for spammers to get through and waste our time.