Everyone has the trouble daily of going through their email inbox and deleting numerous spam emails.

Perhaps you have a brand new email address, and you would like to ensure that your email address will be free from spam. In order to understand how spam works and the steps you need to make to keep your email as free from spam as possible, you must first understand how people use bots, spiders, email harvesters, list parsers and other programs to collect your email address without your knowledge.

Just because someone needs to be a registered user of a website or social network in order to get your email address does not mean that it is safe. The algorithms and spiders which all of the major search engines use scan and see everything on all of the millions of pages on the internet they index. Chances are, if you google your email address, you will find a listing for it at least once. This is because if you enter your email address into a guest-book, a forum, or add a comment on a blog, it can be indexed by the search engines. Many email harvesters search for people’s email address using web directories like dmoz.org, or they they search the profile section of yahoo.com. Everything today is virtually automated with email address collection. They are generally software programs that collect email addresses at the touch of a button. In fact, one can collect millions of email addresses in less than a few hours. Even if you supply your email address as a jpg or gif image file, some bots are sophisticated enough to actually translate the picture into text. The best email harvesters can even outsmart the captcha text requests, where you enter randomly generated text to avoid spam.

Your best bet is to create an alternate address to use for such signups, or not use them at all — unfortunately, in this day and age, it is not possible to avoid them entirely.