One source of spam is web-published email addresses. Every time you enter your email into a website which is publically accessible, it is possible that an automated email address collection tool will find it, record it, and allow it to be included in future spam lists.

One simple method to help protect published email addresses from becoming captured by these tools is to encode or encrypt them in such a way as to prevent spambots from seeing them. Two excellent online tools are available here:

Simple Email Encoder: Unicode and Escape encoding methods

Advanced Email Encoder: Mixed encoding, email header, embedded images and cursors, junk objects, javascript