I'm not sure how, but I must have gotten on about 1000 spam mailing lists. My current 30-trailing-days spam count in my personal gmail account is 6970. (edit: posted unread spam count rather than total spam count) Anyone beat me?

Well, I beat you as far as minimum is concerned. My spam folder is always empty, since I empty it regularly :) I've been incredibly lucky so far - although my email addresses are posted all over the place, I only get around 10-20 spam mails per month.

if i sign up to a forum, shopping website or anything which has no long term life importance i use my hotmail, if its important i use my work email or my university email.

My important email addresses receive no spam whatsoever.

Quote: Original post by RivieraKid
if i sign up to a forum, shopping website or anything which has no long term life importance i use my hotmail, if its important i use my work email or my university email.

That was my plan too, until I got lazy.

I think my E-mail address was harvested pretty recently; I used to get ~5 spam E-mails a day and I now get about 30-40 [sad]

My university had a faculty-wide contact page, so my university address has been out there for a while. Unfortunately someone decided that my nice .edu.au address was the perfect thing to spoof their spam with, so I have received bounceback emails from about half of Russia.

I don't particularly mind so much with GMail since their filter is extremely good, but it's annoying every now and then to see a legit email hiding amongst the piles of crud.

I use a different email address for registration online sites, and for personal emails with people. So far I never got a lot of spam on my personal mail address, though of course it does happen because your email address gets used and abused by whatever crapware there exists once it's known on other people's computer.

So the stats:

Personal email address: average a few spam per day
Website signup address: 50 a day maybe

So no matter what they claim, websites that need your mail address to sign up DO use it for more than just "registration purposes". It's not like I signed up to _fishy_ sites with it.

Quote: Original post by Lode
So no matter what they claim, websites that need your mail address to sign up DO use it for more than just "registration purposes". It's not like I signed up to _fishy_ sites with it.

Either that, or third parties are harvesting email addresses from user profile pages.

Mailinator has saved my life.

I have SpamAssassin running on the mail server on a relatively low setting. I get about 5 junk emails a day, most of which are in Chinese or Russian (which I guess SpamAssassin doesn't "speak"), which are usually cleaned up by Live Mail Desktop.

Quote: Original post by RivieraKid
if i sign up to a forum, shopping website or anything which has no long term life importance i use my hotmail, if its important i use my work email or my university email.

My important email addresses receive no spam whatsoever.

Same here. My yahoo mail keeps getting 100+ spam per month, and my gmail is (almost) always clean. I think I've gotten 3-4 spam emails total in the last 2 years, and luckily they were the type that if you unsubscribe they stop bothering you.