I have had my main email address for more than a year now, and I haven't had any trouble with it yet. Before this I had one that I used for a few years, and it was only just before I had to switch (the ISP was bought out) that I received any spam at all. I only give it out to friends, or use when buying things from companies that I trust (well, as much as you can trust any company). For everything else I use my hotmail account, which does recieve about 10-30 spam emails a day.
Something that may have helped with this is that I don't store the email address anywhere on the computer that I don't have to. In Internet Explorer there is an option to store commonly used values for filling in forms, and I don't use it. I know there have been security problems with this before where a website could read this data thanks to various security problems. I seem to remember similar problems happening with Outlook. It sounds like a security flaw in Outlook allowed a hacker to steal the source code to the Half-Life 2 game.
Another point is that I used Macs for most of that time at home. They aren't as susceptible to the above problems, as most hackers don't seem to care about taking advantage of what few security problems there are on Macs. My dad still uses a Mac, and he gets all kinds of Windows email viruses and just deletes them. So maybe using a Mac or Linux would help a little, or at the very least something other than Outlook if possible.
goates