Email abuse in the form of bulk advertising is becoming a major
nuisance on the net as the volume of this junk is rising and
threatens to become a flood. The recently established forum on
the problem, news.admin.net-abuse.email quickly became one of the
most active newsgroups as posters discuss instances and varieties
of this abuse -- including spammers who become vindictive when
challenged and have been known to send nasty, threatening messages
or mailbomb people who complain to their ISP's, etc.

The spammers gather email addresses from newsgroup postings, web
sites and mail servers (like this one). The problem became so acute
for me that I changed ISP's to get a new email address, which I've
kept secret, and so far haven't received any junk spam.

On the other hand, I also stopped contributing to this forum for the
same reason, as posting here makes one's email address visible to
all subscribers (some of which may be spammers themselves).

I recently got another account (this one) and am posting this message
as a test to see if I get any advertising spam at this email address,
which will not be used in any other way, ie. no newsgroup postings,
etc. The result will be posted here if anyone's interested.