Many website owners include their personal or company email on their website to make it easier for visitors to contact them. Unfortunately, this can make them a target for email address harvesting. They may start to receive a huge volume of spam messages without realizing why. Spambots or robots are used by spammers to continuously scan forums, blogs and websites to collect email addresses.

The good news is that there are some simple methods you can use to protect your email addresses and publish email links on your website. They will enable users to easily contact you while protecting your email address from spammers.

A company called Syronex offers a free tool to help you in the fight against spam. Their antispam tool stores your published email address in a coded form. A full JavaScript interpreter must be used to reveal it. The best part is that the encoded link will appear to be a regular email link. This means that visitors can clink on it to send you an email without any problems. In fact, they won’t even be able to tell you have protected your address.

The free program provides users with two options. You can encode your email address or choose an even stronger encryption method. Although it is the safest option, it will require users to type letters revealed in a graphic called a captcha. This verifies that the request is being made from a legitimate person rather than a spambot. Once the letters have been entered correctly, the email client window will appear.

You can find the spam protection tool by visiting at http://w2.syronex.com/jmr/safemailto/.

Spam has become much more than a major nuisance and a valuable waste of hard drive or server space; it can also severely affect employee productivity. For example, employees now spend more trying to filter legitimate email messages from the ever-increasing unwanted junk mail that floods their in-box. During this time-consuming and unproductive task, one or two important email messages often end up in the recycle bin. This can cause even greater frustration and lost time, not to mention a possible loss of sales and clients.

Spam also slows Internet access. A steady flow of spam can take up a large majority of a company’s bandwidth. This can hamper productivity, especially for anyone who must conduct online research or send email messages to clients on a regular basis. Even worse, spam messages may contain harmful viruses, Trojans or scripts that can cause even more damage and wasted time.

Some companies become so inundated with spam messages that they find it difficult to use their email system. Users may receive dozens or even more junk mail messages every single hour. According to recent surveys, approximately one out of every five email messages received is spam. An average employee will spend approximately 5 seconds to delete each unwanted message.

This may not seem like a large amount, but you must factor in the number of employees within your organization. If your company employs 30,000 people, each person ends up wasting valuable time and resources deleting spam. You can just imagine how much time and money in lost productivity is wasted per year!

Another scenario is becoming more common. One of your employees may accidentally open a spam message that contains a malicious script. This can cause the user’s computer to dial a 900-number or access a harmful website. This problem can grow out of control so quickly that every employee in your company may be required to obtain a new email address. Every client must be informed of the new contact information. This can wreak havoc on a small company with limited resources.

Make sure you purchase secure anti-spam protection for your company and verify that every employee’s computer uses it. You should also ensure your company server is well protected. This can reduce the amount of lost hours and money wasted each week due to spam.