Reply #7: Well, if you don't put your email address on the web ever you'll cut a lot

[Bossy Monkey]

out. The spambots find any email address on any webpage and this will generate untold amounts of spam. Some shrewd folks will put nospam in the middle of their email addresses when they need to post them, just explaining to any humans reading the page to take the nospam out. But presumably the evil swine who program spambots will figure this out eventually, too.

The other big way to get spam is when they just try every variant of a given email address at a given ISP. Thus my email address starts with pudntane but I get a lot of spam for pudknocker. Maybe you're on a small or unpopular ISP, I don't know.

I never used to get spam and actually would brag on Earthlink in this regard, but those days are well over. Still, I average maybe one a day, so can't complain compared to some sufferers.