Find a good ISP or domain name registrar who will allow you to have your own domain name as an email destination. This typically allows you anything@your.domain.name. Anything sent to the domain is forwarded to your private email account.
When you register online and are asked for your email, use the service's own name as the email name. For instance, I have pj.evans.name, so I have registered here as whynot.public@pj.evans.name.
If I start getting spam I firstly can tell who sold me out by the destination address and secondly can block the message by just blocking that particular 'To' address (easy in Outlook).
Not perfect, but I don't get much spam.
In the UK I can recommend UKReg who offer a domain-based email forwarding service.
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That is quite brilliant. To get "anything"@yourdomain.name do you have to do anything or is that automatic?
Yes I do this too. I find Namesecure to be easiest to use for this purpose.
Great idea. I voted "for" it, but...
If there is a pattern to your email names and I can figure out that you told amazon.com that your email address was amazon.com@your.domain.name then I can make Amazon.com look bad by signing this email address up for spam. (This was discussed in Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram newsletter one month.) It's better to use a random string of letters and numbers for each email and keep a list somewhere to decode them, but it's also a lot less convenient.
A follow-up to Barry's comment...
1) Find a domain registrar who offers an email forwarding service
2) Register a domain name of your choice (e.g. yourname.com)
3) Configure the email forwarding to send anything@your-domain to your own usual account - who address you only share with those you trust
No software or anything required
For instance, my private address is just that. Private. However, I registered pj.evans.name with a registrar (UKReg - only cost £9 for two years) and told it to send everyhthing to my private address. When a spammer comes along, I can ignore all posts form that address. Job done.
In another post a valid comment was made about pattern recognition. Good point, but you dont have to use the name - it just makes it essy to remember - so, I could use kdjhsgf@pj.evans.name for Amazon.
Unfortunately, this idea isn't a good one at all. Catch-all addresses receive lots of spam and worm email these days. It's true that this a means to track the dissemination of the email addresses you give away, but the risks involved are fairly substantial.
I receive about 40 megabytes of Swen.A worms per day in one mailbox, imagine what happens if there dozens of them. You might block some of them at the SMTP level, but this starts to require more technical expertise than most users would like to acquire.
BIG PROBLEM here. Beware, this method can create more work than it saves you in the long run. A friend suggested this to me years ago. So, I used it, until things got bad. Example: Each time I registered a new piece of software from companyX I used companyX@mydomain.com. Now, one of the leading graphic arts software companies (I won't name names) accidentally leaked (as they put it) my email address. I should note this has happened many times. Now, I recieve a large volume of spam on this account. BUT, I still love the software, it is an industry standard and I as a graphic artist could not live without it. I also could not live without their emailed updates or alerts of new products and enhancements. Therefore, I cannot simply cancel this account.
Spam has become a major issue for me. I personally love the "WhyNot" idea regarding giving me the ability to charge a bulk sender at my discretion. Who would not want this power? See http://whynot.net/view_idea.php?id=75
When you combine PJEvans' idea with a spam filter that can parse for the sent "TO" address (rather than the usual whitelist - which inspects the "From" address), the idea becomes 1000 times more powerful! Someone has done exactly that! See:http://vanquish.com/6/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=8006038591&f=9006028962&m=4556028805
The company doing this, Vanquish, is discussed in Barry & Ian's book and also in WhyNot article #75:http://whynot.net/view_idea.php?id=75
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Something similar which doesn't require your own domain name. A lot of mail servers will ignore text after a + sign. So if your address is bob@something.com you can type bob+whnot@something.com and it'll still get sent to your address. If you just put the site name after the plus for each registry you will instantly know where the mail came from, and you can filter based off of that since when you receive the mail it would include the extra text. While this doesn't really stop spam since the spam is still sent and received by your mail server, it's easy to keep it from showing up in your inbox.