Do you get odd emails and wonder how they got your email address? Never been to a porn site and yet get porn emails? Do you get viagara emails? Or any medication emails at all? Home mortgage emails?

It seems like I get more junk and useless email from people I know than I do from spammers. Your friends and family have good intentions but there are some simple guidelines you can follow and protect yourself and your email account.

Here's some email guidelines:

Don't forward an email and leave all the email addresses it has been sent to showing. Why you might ask. There are programs out there that real spammers use to grab email addresses. When you forward (or even reply) with all the addresses showing you just gave spammers the opportunity to get all those email addresses. Imagine if the email went out to 10 people who sent it on to 10 people .....there's my email address and yours vunerable again and again.

Don't send every joke to everybody. Some people seem compelled to send every joke they get to every person in their address book. Don't waste my time only send me what yo uthink I might be interested in. If I miss out on a joke email I'm sure I will live.

Don't forward emails and consider that keeping in touch. I've had friends (notice past tense) that thought keeping in touch was forwarding an email. Nope, it's not. Once in a while send that person a note and see how they are doing.

Stop forwarding the "true good to be true" emails. Disney World and Pepsi will give you money to forward this to all your friends, Microsoft and AOL will send you money, send this to everybody in your address book and you will have good luck,...you get the idea. Spammers love this because these things make their way around the Internet quickly.

Stop sending the fake warning emails. "I'm a police offier and my wife is a nurse and I never thought anything bad would ever happen to our kids......blah, blah, blah, send to all the parents you know" or a "woman stops for gas and a guy jumps in her car blah, blah, blah,...send to all the women you know and all the men you know to send to all the women they know".

Be careful before you hit a "reply all" to an email. I've seen people get fired, lose friends or get in trouble for this one.

Email is a great medium and email marketing is fine. Let's just use it wisely folks.

Robin Dary is the marketing power behind http://www.ParkerComputerGuy.com. Parker Computer Guy is a computer repair and consulting business in Parker, CO.