[patrickp]

There's no way to ensure an email address won't be targeted by spammers, Brian - the best way would be to create a name with random characters and then never use it. As an example, I haven't used any of the ntl email addresses I've had since my cwcom one (and I don't use the cwcom at all for communicating with people - it simply serves as an address for various reasonably trustworthy subscriptions) and I don't think I've ever had any spam on any of them.

Firstly, as has been mentioned previously in this thread, spammers use name generators with the domain names for large ISPs, and it's pretty likely that they will check out how the ISP presents its email addresses when doing this. So it's fairly certain they will use aspects of an ISP's naming policies such as numbers after a name to distinguish between users with the same name. Try putting number characters into the middle of the name as a better way to combat this. And they're happy to use a 'scattergun' approach; they don't mind if most of the very large list of names they create miss, just so long as a few get a response.

When you use an email address, even if only with trusted friends, it's going to wind up in their address books. And then it only needs one machine to be compromised (and face it, a lot of people have infected machines now and never know it) for that address to be used, not only to send emails to you, but to send emails to others using your address as the return one. See how easy it is to get your address plastered all over the internet?

And that's why I get concerned over, for instance, your publishing someone's email address that you thought had sent you spam. As I demonstrated, it was extremely unlikely that the address you published was the originating address - i.e. it was spoofed - and, even if it wasn't a valid address (and it may well have been a valid one) the domain, which belongs to a telco providing 'phone services to disadvantaged people in California, will have to deal with any spam sent to that address.

Yes, it is possible that an employee of ntl has sold a list of email addresses, but I would consider it much less likely than that the people who've been getting spam are the victims of a spammer creating lists, or simply haven't been careful enough with their addresses - as I said before, just using an email address, even carefully, is probably enough to compromise it. The reason why none of my ntl emails have ever received spam is simply that I've never used any of them.