I probably register at a new site three or four times a month, most of which require my email address. When I read certain threads here and talk to other friends and family it seems most people are simply bombarded with the stuff, but in the year or so I’ve had my account I can count on one hand the number of spam-emails I’ve received.
What gives?
Jeeze, most folks are happy never to see it. But oddly enough, I only get it at my Hotmail address, and nowhere else.
You must not visit enough porn sites.
IMHO most spam is generated by leaving email addresses on message boards or by not selecting the ‘no spam’ options when signing up to websites. It sounds like you’ve been careful not to do that. I honestly believe that most spam is generated through carelessness, and only a minority through unscrupulous ‘businesses’.
You have not typed into AOL chat rooms, have you? AOL, as I said before, has no concept of the right to privacy.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. I remember filling something out online which required my first name and my last name’s initial. Shortly thereafter, I received an e-mail using my first name, last initial in the subject line. Soon it started multiplying. Now, well over a quarter of my spam has that type of “personalized” greeting in the subject.
Perhaps I wasn’t careful enough the first time I gave out that info, but I can guarantee that information has been passed to at least 100 different lists already.
Perhaps it’s a function of your ISP, too. I have an ISP I use for my home machine, and since all my “real” mail is routed to my company mail account via a forwarding service, that ISP represents an email address that I’ve hardly ever used or given out. At most, I’ve used it to get immediate confirmation notices for one-shot interactions back from commercial sites. The damn thing gets spammed. Every few weeks I go in and clean out a hundred or so messages. It got spammed almost immediately from the day I got the account. I’m tempted to just let it build up indefinitely, since I don’t care, but I get anal about such things.
Thing is, it’s an ISP I wouldn’t particularly expect bad behaviour from - the old “scruznet”, which became “tychonet”, and has been gobbled up by “Dsl.net” (their service has degraded, too, and I’m going to ditch them, but that’s a different topic). Whether just from running a loose ship, or from them actually flogging their user lists off to somebody, I think some spam list wound up automatically including all their accounts.
Oh, I agree: some companies certainly are completely unscrupulous (which is why I have a separate address for junk mail and registrations). However, I still think the majority of spam comes from people or bots trawling web pages, message boards and member directories (like Hotmail’s). I have two Hotmail addresses and another web mail address. One of the Hotmail addresses was my main one for years, and I eventually abandoned it because of the spam – I’d left on boards, plastered in on websites and all that. The others are 99.9% spam-free so far.
CNet recently did a little experiment to see which activities generated the most spam. Usenet posting and AOL chat rooms were the worst.
The most spam I get is the address I use for one of my Web sites, a comedy e-zine. we get constant spam at our address there because the site gets the most traffic out of all of my sites, and I believe we have the address posted a lot.
I also get a lot of spam at my regular address, and since I usually don’t use it to sign up for odds’n ends online, I suspect it got taken off of a couple of other less-traveled sites I have up on which I use that address.
I don’t use my ISP’s provided address but I bet if I did, I would get some ISP-provided spam.
From this data, I am convinced that the way most spammers are getting addresses is Web crawling and just looking for that @ symbol.
A good practice is to have a spam address at Yahoo or Hotmail and use that address to sign up for things like contests or sites that you aren’t really interested in getting email from. Also, be sure to read all forms carefully and un-check boxes that offer you free junk mail. In almost all cases, they are pre-checked and you can easily forget to say “no.”
I made a new site recently and have been very careful to not post my address on it at all. If users want to contact me they must use a form, which is programmed with ASP and in theory that means my address will never be “seen”. We’ll see if this works!
As for the OPer, congrats on your lack of spam 
Me too! I’ve tried using Hotmail’s “block address” on the spam I’ve received, only to get spammed by the same person/organization/whatever with a very similar address. You’d think by now Microsoft would invest in spam filters or something…grrr…
I’ve never gotten spammed at my Yahoo address – the only things I get there besides message notifications are the e-newsletters I signed up for. The only spam I receive at my primary e-mail address is from my ISP.
I’ve never bought anything online except airline tickets, nor have entered contests and such, which is probably why the amount of spam I receive is minimal compared to others.
I get a fair bit of this stuff. Four or five a day. The main thing is to never click on any “unsubscribe” link the in the spam, as this tells the spammer your address is an active one. Another good trick is to use a different fake middle initial every time you need to submit your name anywhere online. It won’t stop the spam, but you’ll know which sites are guilty of selling mailing lists.
I used to get a bit of spam, but then I saw this and started my own personal “Spammee strikes back” crusade.
I’m tempting fate by saying this, I know, but I’ve had no unsolicited spam for five weeks or so now. Maybe word gets around, huh? 
When I got my Mindspring account two years ago, I tried to be careful about spam. I used a few random letters and numbers for the primary mailbox, and then set up 3 mailboxes with regular names. I have never ever used the primary address for anything, since it’s the only one that I can’t delete. Somehow, I still get spam at that address. I thought maybe Mindspring was selling their addresses, so I emailed them and asked, but they say that they aren’t selling their addresses. Still, I wonder how an address I’ve never used nor told to anyone can get that much spam.
It’s done by a “dictionary spam” method. Large ISPs are frequently the target of these attacks. They send a spam to every possible mail address. They start with “a@mindspring.com” and don’t stop until they get to “99999999@mindspring.com.” Some of the messages will get through. The hits on real addresses are collated for further spamming.
Sucks, doesn’t it?