Its not that I dont know what is in my stuff, its just that I have so many old ones, that I cant remember what is in them. It would take me a ton of time to do this, and I really really dont want to bother.
Too much fun stuff going on this summer, to delve into such a time consuming project.
So I will probably just follow Paddy's instructions and go with a new addy.
Take a look at whats in here from the screenshot, its about 170 separate pages.
I just looked at some of the old puppy picture pages, yea there are tons of them, and all the email info in them is to my gmail address and no problem with it, so far.
Ok - let's clarify a few things. When you did that Google search, Jane, it pulled up a number of hits, but if you look at the results a bit more closely, you'll see that almost all of them have your
web site address (the jcdouglass.net part) in them, but NOT your email address. The instances of your email address being out there clearly visible are relatively rare; the Nevil Shute site, the capecode site (which I'd forgotten about) and that email list site. Any one of those could be the source of the issue with the spam. All it takes is one bot, putting you on one well-circulated list...which likely results in it getting on more lists...and you start getting spam. Sometimes you can't tell where it's coming from. Sometimes you sign up for something/into a trusted site and they aren't actually quite so trustworthy after all and/or an employee sells the info on the side. You cannot always track things down. And in the end, it's actually not going to help anything as you can't stop the spammers on that address.
All you can do really is make sure that you're careful going forward with the new address, and get another new address that you use just for the less-trusted sites etc. I do get the odd bit of spam on my primary address - a couple a week at the very most. I have absolutely no idea where they came from, as I never use that email addy anywhere that I'd be suspicious about. It's not an issue though - it's hardly the flood you're experiencing.
Any time you put your email address online anywhere in either the text that is displayed, or in the HTML (a link) the spam bots can get it. There are rare ones that apparently will decode the ASCII code for the "@" too, according to what I've read, though I've yet to have that happen in real life on the few sites I still have up that use that masking tool. For the most part, spambots are lazy (or the coders are) and they just look for the "@" in the code and the displayed text, because they do just fine gathering lots of working email addresses that way. That is why you should use a contact form that doesn't contain the email address. There are lots of them out there and you don't have to pay for one that works. See:
http://ftutorials.com/responsive-html5-and-php-contact-form/ for instance.
Also be aware that spammers will send spam to commonly used email addresses at domains whether those addresses exist or not; "info@yourdomain.com", "webmaster@..." - you get the picture. It's a scattershot approach which probably isn't terribly effective, but they still use it.
