You'd be surprised, Dennis. I've heard some columnists and bloggers, who have to have their email address in the open, complain about hundreds of spams a day. I've been very careful with my email addess, and I usually only get about 10 to 20 a day. I had a little bit of a bump shortly after my cousin gave my email address to eVite when setting up our secret santa a year ago, but it went back down again.

Maybe you've been careless on other online forums in the same way. One way to check is to google for your email address. Usually, you can have the forum moderators delete your email address from their archives. Spammers prefer fresh email addresses, so if you stamp it out everywhere, your spam will start to show a decrease within a month.