Two Simple Steps to Fight Spam
Spam can be fought without causing you, the recipient of such e-mail, to jump through hoops. You just have to be careful with whom you give your address to. By adopting two simple rules, you can seriously reduce the amount of spam you get. Please note that I said reduce, not eliminate because no one can guarantee 100% efficiency. 
The first rule is: don’t hand over your address willy-nilly. This may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at the number times people just enter their address in the form on their screen without realizing this is how spam can start. Not that it happens every time, but it can happen under some circumstances.
Keep the one address you really feel strongly about (the one you want protected) for close friends or businesses that you can rely on. Give another address — one you don’t feel strongly attached to — to all other recipients. Free e-mail services abound, so you have no excuse to create at least one to serve as a stooge when registering for online services, or making purchases.
On that note, I have a few Gmail invitations that I can send to readers who are interested. It’s Google’s service that shook up the e-mail industry by offering 2 GB of space, e-mail forwarding, labels instead of folders, and more…all for free! Just send me a message using my contact form. Supply is limited.
The second rule is: use a disposable e-mail address. Services such as Gishpuppy, Sneakemail, and E4ward can forward e-mails sent to the address of your choosing. All are free, but the last two offer premium services with a few extra features if you’re interested.
These services work as proxies and only send messages to the address you tell them to. The next time you’re asked to enter an e-mail address, you click on their link to generate a new one. This is important: you’re creating a new, working e-mail address for each place you use it. This is good because you can have one for Site A, another for Site B, and so on. But you don’t have to logon to them to get your e-mails because they’re forwarded to the one you gave them.
The reason this is good is so that you can cut off the site who’s abusing the address you gave them. If they’re not honoring their policy of unsubscribing you at your request, then just log into your account and cancel that address.
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Thank you for helping parents protect their children from online predators.
To prevent blog comment spam, every blogger should use:
(1) Email Notification of blog comments
(2) Word Verification/Character Recognition captchas
(3) Comment Moderation w/Delayed Posting
Some blogs and sites also require User Registration to verify the identity of a commenter, but I don’t think that is necessary for most personal blogs.
Corporate blogs might do Registration, but more for marketing data about users, I suspect.
I have a blog called Blog Core Values you may like.
I have a deconstructive MySpace blog that is investigating MySpace from within, called SoMeEx. Links are on my Vaspers the Grate site.
Keep up the good work.
EMAIL SPAM TIP: Never display your email address in normal manner with @ and .
Use [at] and [dot] instead.
steven[dot]streight[at]gmail.com
that way, spambots can’t harvest it.