what I've learned about spam emails

In case any of you are wondering where your junk email comes from, when you never give your email address out, or if you have a separate email account for online shopping or email subscriptions - I think I may have figured it out.

Hotmail not only sells/gives away hotmail email addresses, but also all of the people's addresses in their users' contacts list, or so it seems. I didn't have ANY junk mail in my new email account (gmail) until I started emailing someone with a hotmail account. Now the junk mail doesn't stop. I had hotmail in the past, and only a day after starting my account, I had about 70 junk emails, and I hadn't given my email out yet. So it was obvious that they were very willing to sell the email addresses of their users, and since then, (in each of my 3 past email accounts that were not hotmail) as soon as I correspond with someone who has a hotmail account, the junk mail starts! I used my most recent email account for about 6 months with no spam/junk/phishing emails, but as soon as I correspond with a hotmail user, that's when it starts.

I'm not sure if any of you are as bothered with junk/phishing emails as I am, but if you are, you might want to keep the hotmail thing in mind - especially if you start fresh with a new email account.

Or does everyone already know all of this?

I also noticed that Columbia House seems to spark a lot of junk mail.