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to this. First, just as with postal junk mail, legitimate companies sell their address lists. Any time you give your email address to any company, you are taking the chance that they will sell it someone else who may in turn sell it to another party.

More often it is a less than reputable company fishing for email addresses under false pretenses. It may be a contest or drawing, a free sample or a request for information. Regardless of what the pretext is, any time you type your email address into a web page, you are saying send me all the junk mail you want to.

Also, if your email address is on a web site anywhere, say associated with your business or work, it is subject to abuse. There are computers running robotics programs out there that search through the internet looking at page after page and copying any email address they find on those sites. There are ways to foil this, but not quite as easily.

Then there are programs that simply make up email addresses. To start they have a database of company names. Then they run a program against this database, making an assumption about the domain name used (say the company is Microsoft, they will assume Microsoft.com). Then they append common names to the front of this using various combinations. Remember, it's not costing them anything extra to send out millions of bad emails. So this machine my create johna@microsoft.com, johnb@microsoft.com, etc. Unless you have a very unusual name and/or company name, sooner or later one of these robots will get also. You can't avoid these, but you can keep from making it worse if you get one.

Viruses, which are like spam but more dangerous usually get your address a different way. If someone has or runs a virus on their computer, most of them will open and read that person's address book and start sending itself to everyone on that list. In this way, the email address looks like it comes from a friend or coworker. What should be a tip off however, is that the subject line and body of the email will usually not make sense. If you're not expecting the email and it looks strange, delete it! If you're not sure, call or email this person and ask if they sent it to you. Under no circumstances open an attachment unless you are absolutely sure of the sender, the file, and its purpose.

Regardless of how they get your address, there are ways to minimize the problem to a certain degree. The first line of defense is when and how you give out your address. Minimally, you should have two email

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