the only thing you can do to keep your mailbox relatively spam-free is to be very careful giving it out...
Just make a practice of handing out some hotmail address to these kind of web forms and such, rather than handing out your real mailbox that you care about.
Any potential spam ends up there, and you can just take a look every once in a while when you're expecting something in particular, and not be bothered by it the rest of the time.
But once your email address is 'out there' and the spamfloods have opened, there is almost nothing you can do to make it stop again.
Just make a practice of handing out some hotmail address to these kind of web forms and such, rather than handing out your real mailbox that you care about.
Any potential spam ends up there, and you can just take a look every once in a while when you're expecting something in particular, and not be bothered by it the rest of the time.
But once your email address is 'out there' and the spamfloods have opened, there is almost nothing you can do to make it stop again.