The rise of the Internet has also seen the rise of spam to such a degree that most people receive far more spam email than real email. That's where online email providers like Yahoo really shine. Instead of using your 'real' email address when filling out online forms, sign up for a free Yahoo email address and let all the spam go to Yahoo.
You can sing up for a free Yahoo email address by going to either mail.yahoo.com or mailyahoo.com. Both web addresses redirect to Yahoo mail and will let you sign up for a new account.
The great thing about free Yahoo email addresses is that you can sign up for more than one relatively easy. You simply need to come up with a unique Yahoo ID and pass the CAPTCHA test, which is that test with the crazy letters and numbers. The rest of the information required is pretty generic.
You can use your free Yahoo email address to sign up for websites from Twitter to Facebook to Tagged
In my line of work, I have to sign up for a lot of websites. Most of the time, I'm not even going to use the website beyond the few days I use for testing out or creating a profile of the site. Sometimes with websites like Tagged, which is known for pushing email spam, I know I don't want to use my main email address. That's where alternates like my free Yahoo email address really come in handy.
Social networks love to send you an email for any thing that happens to your profile on the network. The sly ones like Classmates.com will even send you email alerts when someone simply views your profile in hopes of luring you back to the site. Most legitimate social networks like Facebook and MySpace let you turn off these alerts, but if you signed up with an email address you never check, you don't even have to go that far.
You can also use the throwaway account for getting through newspaper registrations and signing on to online message boards. In terms of protecting you from spam, a free Yahoo email account is probably the best tactic available.