Like I said on IRC today, I liken the fight against spam to the world being overrun by flesh-eating zombies. No, really, stay with me here. In this situation, you have two different groups. The type 1 crowd cowers in boarded-up abandoned-looking homes, being very quiet and inconspicuous, hoping to avoid the zombies' notice. By staying silent and never going outside, this type believes that the zombies will simply pass them by. In terms of email, this group never publishes their email address publicly. They will give it out through direct person-to-person methods only, and rely on tools such as a web form-based emailer that spammers are not equipped to abuse. Or if they do reveal their email address publicly, they do so encoded; the address itself may contain clearly marked instructions that a human mind can recognize and parse but the spammer's address harvesters are not sophisticated enough to understand.

Members of the type 2 crowd armor plate their Magnum V8 Dodge pickup, ring the outside with jagged spikes, and then pile into the bed armed with shotguns, automatic rifles, and flamethrowers. Then they cruise around, doing whatever the damn hell they want. They're constantly under zombie attack, but they hardly even notice it most of the time, because almost all of the soulless beasts are too dumb to avoid the spikey bits arranged around the truck and so they mindlessly impale themselves. These are the people who run aggressive spam filters, such as SpamAssassin, and they do their best to keep their filters up to date and their Bayesian databases current with all the latest spam emails.

Each choice has its advantages and disadvantages. The type 1 crowd is all happy and good for a time, except that it almost never lasts. Either someone inside the house screws up and makes their presence known, or some unscrupulous asshole sells the address to the evil Zombie Overlords for a pile of blood-stained money. In either case, suddenly there's a flood of zombies attacking the house which is completely undefended, and so the people must run and flee and try to find a new home, except that they can't contact the post office to provide a forwarding address (the zombies read those) and now they have to call all their friends and give them their new telephone number.

For the type 2 crowd, they generally don't even notice all the zombies that their big truck is grinding into the pavement. Once in a while, one the sneakier zombies will get between the spikes and try to claw its way into the back. A couple of shotgun blasts to the head and the unholy thing is dead once more, dumped in a ditch somewhere to rot. Very rarely, their big engine of destruction will plow over some poor bastard who's actually still alive. It takes a bit of dedication to peer over the roof and scrutinize all the zombies before you run them down, just to make sure you're not doing in people who don't deserve to be splattered. Running a good spam filter means you may average about a spam a day getting into your inbox. If you want, you can check your spam folder for false positives. You can split your spam up by score so that you only check the low-scoring spams for false positives.

So while the type 2 group can go on indefinitely with only the occasional minor inconvenience, if the email addresses of the type 1 crowd start getting spread around all of the spammer lists and those folk decide to stay type 1, they go through a tremendous hassle converting everything and everyone over to their new address.

To me, there's not even a question. It's easier on everyone and myself to make my email address public and just delete the occasional spam that gets through the filters.