If you're reluctant to give out your working email address, use a disposable email address http://lifehacker.com/software/disposable-email-address/. Using a disposable address is a good strategy to eliminate the possiblilty of a company using your address to deliver spam or to sell it to a spammer.
(Jan 06) Before you click that Unsubscribe button, read this article by Brian Livingston How to Know When Unsubscribing Isn't Safe. E-mail newsletters proudly proclaim, "You can unsubscribe at any time!", but how do you know that for sure? What if unsubscribing from an e-mail newsletter actually prompted the publisher to sell your e-mail address to spammers, who then sent you more spam? Most legitimate unsubscribe links actually unsubscribe you; however, unsubscribe buttons in spam or other UCE do nothing at all, and some actually provide your email address to spammers.
(Sep 03 - PC World is proud to present Spam Watch, spamwatch.pcworld.com, a new section of PCWorld.com dedicated to the latest news, tips and tools in the war against online junk mail. PC World's Spam Watch also features "Spam Slayer", an exclusive weekly column, the Top 5 Anti-Spam Downloads with the most popular freeware and shareware to help stop spam, and the latest news on legislation opposing unwanted e-mail.
(Jun 03 - Don't Let Spammers Hijack Your Computer - James Lindley advice at Warning: Spammers could be seizing your PC)
Go into your Task Manager and see if anything's running that shouldn't be. It's a good idea to do this anyway. In Windows you can control somewhat what applications are loaded on startup by running msconfig (START RUN then type in msconfig). If you don't recognize the name of an application, before removing it check to see what it is. I normally do this by doing a search on google.com. [N.B.- other advice includes running a current Antivirus application and also a personal Firewall (e.g. ZoneAlarm), with hardware firewall (router like D-Link's or Linksys') advised]
(May 14 Jan Altman) - disguise your email address from harvester bots by using the word AT instead of the @ symbol, and DOT instead of the period: someoneATdomainDOTcom. If a real person reads this, they know what to do; but a stupid bot will overlook it entirely, because it is looking for a different pattern. Another option is to create a graphic image of your email address.
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