In an ideal world, you'd never publish your email address without first scrambling it. But that's not always going to happen. Here's some tips on how to avoid, and deal with spam.

• When you opt to receive extra offers from a site, be sure it's from a trustworthy site that clearly publishes it's privacy policy or offers specials deals managed by a legitimate company (such a Postmaster Direct).

• Find out what spam filtering options your ISP has in place. There is software out there that can be installed at the server level that can trash a lot of spam before it ever reaches you (this includes viruses). The downside to this is that if they set theirs filter too aggressively, legitimate email will go the the black hole too.

• If you have your own website, host it at a company that either has spam filtering options in place, or will allow you to install your own. If you install your own, you'll need to belly up to the "techno" bar because you'll have to dive into the world of geek to accomplish this. Being able to install your own has the advantage of tweaking the filters to an agressive level and still have a low percentage of "false possitives" (legit email that gets caught in the spam filters).

• If possible, get a free email account and use that for all of your online activity. Once the spam level gets too high in that account, you can drop it and get another. This is a lot easier than trying to change your personal email address every few months.

• An alternative to a free email account is to get an email address from a company like · ChooseYourMail.com - you pay a monthly subscription, but they let only recognized email through. All mail coming in is compared to a list of email address you have ok'd to receive email from. If an email address isn't on the list, an auto response is sent to the person sending you the email, and they have to validate themselves through a special link. Spammers won't go to the hassle to do this.

• NEVER reply to spam to be removed from their list - you've just told them they've found a valid email address, and the amount of spam you receive will multiply. Remember the randomly dialed telephone sales calls?

• Learn to recognize spam subject lines and delete without even opening. Many spammers are using HTML and including images and links that notify them if you open the email. Most of the time this is a 1x1 pixel clear .GIF that you'll never see.

• Update your email software. Many new versions have some type of spam filtering devices built in. · Eudora, · AOL, · Mac OS X Mail and · MSN are a sample of a few. These filters look for common patterns that spammers use, and transfer messages they think are spam to another mailbox. Most of these filters are also "trainable" so you can fine tune what's spam to you. One small shareware program we've found extremely helpful in dealing with spam in Eudora is · Spamnix. There's many others that you can find at shareware sites like · Versiontracker and · Tucows - just do a search for "spam filters".

• In addition to updating and using spam filter plug-ins, learn to use filters (also called rules) in your email program. Depending on what email program you use, the filtering options will vary, but you'll always we be able to set "If it comes from..... transfer to trash" or "If subject line contains.... transfer to trash".