A few 'smart' guys have created Web crawlers whos only task is to look for 'mailto:' tags.
When found,
the following e-mail address is reported back home.
The collection of e-mail addresses is then used for different e-mail 'offers',
offering products, services and even pornographic items.
That is spam.
Of course,
they very 'politely' include the possibility to get excluded from their lists.
They state that 'If you don't want any more e-mail from us, then just answer so and so to this e-mail'.
If you do answer to this 'un-subscribe' offer,
they see it as a confirmation that the e-mail address they used was valid,
and you'll never get rid of them.
That's how dirty they can be.
I had it.
I was (am) so fed up with this spam.
The volume is not huge,
but big enough to make me sick.
Not to mention the contents in some of it.
Personally, I have become so paranoid that I do not even want to write my e-mail address
(in the form of name@domain.top) on any of my pages.
I assume that they can even recognize this as a valid e-mail address.
I'm lucky.
At
SoftCom,
my Web host,
they provide me with the means of using a form and active server pages.
This way I can avoid to use the 'mailto:' tag,
and thereby avoid to expose my e-mail address to those 'spam crawlers'.