For about ten years, I have been very cautious when submitting my e-mail address anywhere. But thanks to careless friends who submitted my address to 'free greetings card' sites not realising that they were simply collecting addresses to spam and 'get a free iPhone' offers which require you to 'invite friends' to share more 'free goodies', I am the lucky recipient of about 300 spam e-mails per day. Fortunately, my e-mail provider filters most of them out for me but I still have to go through the filter daily just in case there has been a filter error.
One cardinal rule has been that when giving an e-mail address, I always give a unique address for the site I am on, e.g. when I submitted my address on the BBC website, I used the address bbc@*mysubdomain*.fsnet.co.uk - thus if I start getting spam sent to this address, I know where the spammers got my e-mail address.
To date, the address which get the most spam were the addresses I registered with the now defunct www.talkabloutgovernment.com who did the blindingly dumb thing of publishing all their members' e-mail addresses on the site without warning. Only once the spammers had harvested the addresses did they warn their members that they did this - though they never thought to stop doing it. About 40% of the spam I get originated from this site. Their stupidity has blighted the e-mail experience of everybody who registered with them. Now they are gone.
The next highest contributor, by a considerable margin, is The Independent newspaper's website, on which I registered using the e-mail address indi@*mysubdomain*.fsnet.co.uk. Easily 5% of the spam I get is sent to this address. I contacted The Independent's IT manager to warn them that their e-mail database had been compromised. They claim to have consulted the relevant person and simply I subsequently received a denial that this could possibly have happened - yet the feedback loop I created for the purpose proves that it did.
Another prominent perpetrator of this carelessness is the site www.americasarmy.com (a subsidiary, I believe, of the US Department of Defense) on which I registered out of curiosity in 2003 to see what brainwashing computer war games they were creating to normalise the art of mass slaughter. This was a slow burner but a couple of months ago, I received my first spam e-mail originating from this registration.
There are others, mainly small businesses with webmasters who, in all likelihood, double up as secretaries or delivery drivers who probably don't know what they are doing but others are sites which may well have sold their databases for profit
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