Chris,

If my understanding is correct, no one can tell what your E-mail address is when you visit a Web site. E-mail and Web browsing are usually completely unrelated operations. Instead, here is what often happens. I believe that I know this from personal experience.

People who put together these lists of E-mail addresses to spam send out an extremely large number of E-mails with every possible address for every known Internet domain.

For example, they would send out:

a@aol.com
b@aol.com

and on and on.

If the E-mail doesn’t get automatically rejected by the domain server it is considered a valid E-mail address. I myself have one address I am fairly sure I have never used. Yet at one point it started getting all of these spam messages.

If you have any normal type of name such as:

Bill@aol.com

You are almost certain to have those E-mail programs find you. On the other hand, if you have an address like:

Abcdefg12345xyz@aol.com

The E-mail programs are unlikely to find you as there are physical limits to just how many addresses they can check. I know one person with an unusual address who visits all kinds of strange Web sites. And he never gets any spam.