Where junk mail senders get my address?

Since i decided to change my email address due to the out-of-control junk mail issue, i have been wondering where junk mail senders get my address. I mean, will they get my address from youtube, ebay, amazon, or newegg? Is it safe to use my new email address to register acounts on these websides since i am so afraid of junk mails? Or should i use another email for business, and keep the other one personal?I had been getting junk mails from all kinds of addresses and the spam wouldn't work!

Places like Amazon and Ebay absolutely do NOT give out your email addresses.... unless you let them! That long TOS and privacy policy most people glaze over and check yes to: read it! Many places you sign up with will have very indiscreet little boxes or things you have to uncheck so you're into isn't sold to third parties.

As for places like YouTube... they may not give out your info, but unless you make sure to check the boxes for 'keep my email private' (or whatever) then it'll be displayed on your profile. If your email address is ANYWHERE on ANY publicly accessible page, the spammers will find it.

Spammers uses 'spiders' - the same kind of software to that Google uses to find web pages - to search for email addresses. It just goes to a page, scans it for anything that looks like an email address "whatever@whatever.com", saves it, then goes to every link on that page, scans those pages, looks for the links on those pages, scans them.... blah blah, you get the idea.

By the end of it they're left with a list of email addresses that may or may not be valid, but they'll send stuff to all of them just to be sure.

You could have two email addresses to be safe (one that's strictly personal, another for everything else), but if you always read what your e-signing, and make sure your email address isn't on any publicly accessible websites, you shouldn't need two.