Alright, what do I find when I check my email today?
How about 1706! "FREE VIAGRA ONLINE -#$#%@^#%#$%#^#^#^#" messages and a message from Apple threatening to cancle my iTools account because I was so far over my account limit.
Not only did it take nearly 20 minutes to download all that shit, and not only did it crash Outlook Express. Each message also included a MacroVirus called "Life Stages", Fortunelty I was on my Macintosh where virii written in VB Script are impotent.
Oddly enough though it's ok to put your real address in the "Reply-to:" field so that people can still automatically reply by email. For some reason address harvesters only seem to check the outgoing "From:" address. I bounce everything sent to my "From:" address, which receives about half a dozen slices of spam a week, but I've only received 2 or 3 pieces of junk mail at my reply-to address in nearly two years.
The other thing to avoid is giving your email address when signing those free guest book things, as the companies that run them make their money by collecting the addresses and selling them on (the same probably goes for most web-based services in fact, so I always use a disposable email address if I have to give my email address when registering at a site. That's what Hotmail was invented for...) AFAICT, people who sign guest books etc. seem to get about five times as much junk mail as people who simply post to usenet.
I must just be insanely lucky. I've been using my real addresses since finding Usenet back in 1992-1993, and I still don't get that much spam. Maybe it's because my e-mail headers don't say "Microsoft Outlook", which is code for "I'm a walking security hole, hit me with viruses and spam!!"
I get about 20-30 spams a day, and most are easily filtered to a secondary mailbox based on the overuse of capital letters, and other such obvious features. If I had to pay per byte for them all, I'd be upset, but as it is, I hardly notice them. Once in a while I take a quick glance at that mailbox to make sure nothing useful found its way there, and then dump it.
Also, most garbled addresses aren't that difficult for a spam harvester to spot, if it's written with any intelligence at all. Just stripping out "nospam" and a few other obvious strings will turn most of them into valid addresses.