Look after your email address

If people looked after their email addresses better and were more careful about who they gave it out to there would be much less of a problem. It is all very well blaming Hotmail for the problem but if you don't want spam look after your email.

I'm had the same Hotmail email account for years and years. In the last 12 months I've had less than 10 bits of spam in my inbox. It's not even as if I have an obscure un-guessable address as it is in the firstnamelastname@hotmail.com format.

Why don't I get a ton of spam? Because I don't use it on untrustworthy websites. If I do want to give an email to an untrusted website I use my generic throw away account that I only look when I'm expecting an immediate response from the website I signed up for.

Even better I use an email account that lets me put anything I like before the @. So when I signed up for this site I used theregister@mydomain.co.uk. So if any of the sites I signed up for do pass my details on someone else I know which one did it.

My point? Don't blame Hotmail for failing to catch spam if you've done nothing to avoid it yourself.