I agree with most of that the remarks in the last several posts; I have now set up accounts that my friends and family use and that (knock on wood) don't get spam. I have all but abandoned the one that I started with, the one that my computer thinks is default and is the address left behind if I visit web sites that collect such data. (I use Anonymizer for some browsing, just to avoid this).
The difficult thing to convince a few friends of is to NOT add my now-serenely spam free address to one of their long open address lists when they send an online petition or humor piece. There are some people who just don't get it--that if you send a whole bunch of friends' addresses in the CC line and someone else who doesn't know how to remove all of that sends it on, your quiet little address is bound to end up somewhere you never intended it to go. A little BCC goes a long way.
I've ended up with a sort of graduated email system. The first one is where the spam goes and email from accounts I set up using that address (I'm gradually changing them to my current business address as they turn up). The new business address is where I've directed the friends who continually make email faux pas--I still get their mail, but I hope to keep the junk that might travel in their wake out of my most personal mail box.
As you suggested, numbers and bits of names work very well. I've combined a few letters from my name, numbers from the house address, and a couple of letters from the street to a form incomprehensible to a machine, but in which my friends and family recognize enough of the words to know that it is me. And that's a very good idea of yours, writing out AT and DOT. I'll adopt that technique.
I never use Outlook at home, and I don't use any of Microsoft's address books. I like Pegasus Mail and I also use Eudora. Netscape Communicator also has a very good email program. These are all downloaded and resident in your computer. The outside email I use (stays resident on someone else's server) is Yahoo mail, which has several good features, such as built in virus scanning abilities. Netscape has a Netscape Mail that is much like Yahoo.
I gave up a long time ago trying to get any of the spam to stop by reporting it to the supposed originating company. Just because it says "Yahoo" or "Hotmail," that usually isn't where it comes from. But the way to keep Spaminator working for me is to send the offending post and header back to the spaminator; this was part of their instructions when I first signed on. Meanwhile, I have tested the theory of reporting back about posts or not--I have all of my emails set so they don't report back anything. You have to go into options or preferences to set this. I've tried sending mail to myself and when it was set to allow a response I heard back, but with it set to prohibit feed back, I got none.
I never use all of these email programs all of the time; I have one at work and a couple at home, and as I said, I'm gradually eliminating the original email assigned by my internet provider. I probably won't unlist it as my default mail as far as Windows in my computer is concerned. The information may be collected by a web site, but if they try sending anything they'll get an error message. For anyone curious about what other sites can learn about your computer, you might want to try Anonymizer's Snoop Test. Now all that shows up is my IP address (but that's enough to send spam). Before the firewall, via modem, it used to show all sorts of stuff, including my name, email, the size of my monitor, the programs I'm running, versions of things--very invasive.