- Using web bots. Similar to search engine bots, some "spider" applications are intended to parse web pages
and collect relevant information. If your mail adress is somewhere on the web, it is likely to be archived by one
or many of these bots.
A solution: you can filter the referrers to your site. Either using server side code, like jsp, php or asp,
or using a htaccess on Apache which will filter all connections to your site at once.
By doing this, you can isolate some well known bots and send them to the nether regions of Bugimus. I mean... well,
nevermind.
- Some websites will resell information about you.
Bluntly put, yes, some will do.
One "solution" against this consists in using two email adresses,
one public, for subscribing to online services, and one private, for communicating with your contacts.
- Dictionaries.
There's not much you can do once someone runs a dictionary driven email adress builder at your domain.
Such a "builder" will use common name dictionaries, and language dictionaries, to build and target
all possible mail recipients in a given domain.
The only thing you can do against this is using a very original mail adress.
Anyhow, even a box you never used will, at some point, receive spam. It's been tested,
by me: a useless box I had never opened, nor used for two years contained about 40 spams the first time I checked it.
ANYHOW, BEWARE OF OUTLOOK "PREVIEW" PANE AND NEVER REPLY TO SPAM:
replying to spam == telling to the spammer that you do exist and that this email target is valid.
previewing a potential spam, if it contains images, can also tell the spammer your adress is
valid, because images embedded in mail can be provided by a remote site.
Once you've seen the image, the remote site already has got a confirmation your adress is valid.
