Spam is junk email. No matter who you are, if you have an email address, you are likely to receive spam in your email inbox. Companies or individuals who collect email addresses are called email harvesters. Some companies pay money for lists of email addresses to enable them to mass market their wares via email. Because there's money involved some people spend their time solely searching for email addresses to sell. Email harvesters use all sorts of tricks to find new email addresses. Many program their computers to automatically search out web sites looking for email addresses. Once your address is found, it is likely to be added to a database and then used once someone purchases a list with your address on it. So by including your email address on your web page, it increases the chance you'll be found by the email harvesters, however, there are ways of avoiding this or cutting it down. FORMS MAKE IT EASIER... Employ Anti-Spam Software. there are a number of free programs available to help you cut down on spam. We use Spamihilator and happily recommend it to anyone. By employing anti-spam software we've reduced our spam to almost nil and we've had our email address on our sites for over 10 years.