spam/avoidance of

Jerome Fine replies: I sounds as if the spam is sent to a list of reasonable e-mail addresses picked by a computer program without any actual verification - unless Hotmail "sells" them - but how would the new list be circulated so quickly? It seems as if a permanent e-mail address will not be possible until the spam problem is handled by the users themselves. I just suggested adding 4 random characters (36 ** 4 = 1,679,616) to my actual e-mail name (before the @) and changing them as needed - BUT with a fallback of replacing the 4 random characters with the current year. Has anyone ever tried this? Obviously, if it became a standard practice, it would not work, but there must be many such replacement methods. And in the mean time, e-mail addresses would start to change so often than perhaps the ISPs would finally find so much spam mail was being rejected that they would actually attempt to stop unsolicited traffic. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine