I second that. In fact I lost my primary Gmail account recently to unsolicited mail, by signing up with just one wrong guy. Started receiving roughly 600 junk daily in my inbox starting from (1) insurance schemes from big banks to (2) UK LOTTERY from our Nigerian brothers.

Betweeen (1) and (2) above, I must say, I did have to actually read first few sentences of (2) to decide that it was spam. That's so true, and scary at that.

I guess, this problem actually stems from the fact that by design email is vulnerable. And that we're forced to keep our email address a secret and share it very carefully - like using simple obscurity [username at servicename dot com] type of stuff... but this is not enough.

This model also makes spam filtering a costly affair for the service provider. I wonder how much additional cost Google has to bear to filter spam and malicious? Have seen it often that flooding continues and continues until the user is forced to change his/her email address and start all over again.

It's no wonder that over 97% of global email is unwanted [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam