good spam study and how to avoid it

The Center for Democracy & Technology ran a six month study on spam. The key findings are that if you place your email address in a user@domain format then you will get spam however if you use a user at domain dot com format then you will get relatively little spam. Make sure that you don't place your email address in public forums in the user@domain format and avoid posting to usenet. However high traffic portal sites are the most common places to get your email address taken, so the last tip is to use a throwaway email address for public forums.