[grubbymitts]

There are many ways of spammers getting your email address through no fault of NTL, many of which have been touched upon here. The ways I know of include:

1) Posting your real email address anywhere (forums, newsgroups etc)
2) Signing up for email newsletters and not ticking boxes stopping them from selling your email to third parties who sell to third parties who sell to third parties etc
3) Friends, Romans, Countrymen who stupidly click on attachments in emails or actually buy the stuff from the spammers (which always comes with a nice spyware bonus)
4) Random email bombing (most likely culprit, whatever anyone says. A spammer has ten or twenty machines each running spamming email software linked to high upload connections that send out millions of emails a day. It only takes a few people to click on these emails to alert the spammer it is real. Lots of spam will also have a link to a picture hosted by the spam bots too. When the picture is requested then the spammer knows that that email address is valid and you will get more spam)

The best way to combat spam mail is to use web email servers like hotmail, yahoo or Gmail as they have very good spam filters. If you must use pop mail, then dump outlook express and download Thunderbird from Mozilla. By default it blocks javascript and pictures in emails so any spam coming through is less likely to be able to check if you have a valid email address.

Hope that helps.