Prevention: How can I stay away from SPAM?

On the romanian language blog related to prevention of computer crime and dedicated to non-technical users, I have added a new practical advice in an attempt to answer questions from the readers asking how to keep their personal email addresses away from receiving SPAM.

Since the article is in Romanian I am outlining here the main points:

• since emails are automatically harvested from internet pages, if you must display your address on a page, write it in a form that will be difficult for software to interpret it as an email address (for instance  "myname [AT] mydomain dot com". Humans will understand it.
• other method is to have a different public email address which you give on public pages - and keep the private one for friends and family communication.
• keep your computer clean of viruses and updated
• do not send further the chain letters you receive from friends and educate them to delete all email addresses from the content of the message and, most important, put all the friends on the BCC (blind carbon copy) field instead of CC field. Chain letters are a method of collecting valid emails to send SPAM to.