You must be one of them experiencing a lot of unwanted emails flooding into your mail box every day. It is annoying, and a "daily" problem for many.

How do the spammers find your email? They can find your email address either in the text of a web page or in a mailto link. The spammers enjoy harvesting the emails and ultimately those emails are spammed with junk mails.

I came to know about some simple methods to protect our email IDs from spammers, which I hope may be of some help to you too.

1. While leaving your email address on the web page or on a text message or on a discussion board, write like this - username @ domainname. com (Please note the space in between). Then during the harvesting process it won't work easily.

2. Write your email like this - username (at the) domainname.com or net, or edu, whatever it may be.

3. Use a web form. Those who genuinely want to contact you will fill the form with their details and get in touch with you. So you know who is contacting you.

4. Never reply to a spam email. Many advise that replying to a spam email confirms your email address to the spammer.

5. While leaving your email address for filling up a form to get more information please check with their privacy policy, to ensure that they won't misuse your email for any other purpose, other than the one you've requested.

6. Make use of your email provider's filtering facility to reduce spam.

Lakshmi Menon is an internet marketer and her website is http://www.net4homeincome.com