Spammers and their bots troll through websites and newsgroups and email lists looking for mailto links or anything with @ in it and send out their rubbish, often hitting a luck with a genuine address. The biggest problem is people who pass on these endless jokes and meaningless emails to their whole mailing list and then cc everybody on it. If you are one of those who is listed on that email its pretty certain that sooner or later somebody will have you on their spam list. Oh, and lists of email addresses can be bought over the internet, and a number of companies seem to hand them out willy nilly to every Thomas Richard and Harold. Webmail seems to have a finger in a few branded email sites, I suspect highveldmail is one of them, the amount of spam there was horrific too. The best thing to do is change your address often and and beware of who gets their fingers on your addy.
