I've got quite a few email addresses. I use my gmail account for anything that I think would risk getting sold or distributed somehow, and as their spam filter is great it's not a problem. I was geting some false positives for a while - notices to moderate posts on my blog (the posts themselves being spam; I've since blacklisted a couple words and it's far less of a problem) since I got about fifty in one day and gmail assumed it was spam. I just marked the address as not spam and it hasn't been a problem since.

My "main" email is given out only to people directly, and doesn't ever touch textboxes on websites for registration or whatever, and I'm inclined to think it was someone with a generator that just got lucky, rather than actually being on a list. Basically, I keep it hidden. In about a year of using that account, I've received no more than three spam messages. I believe my host also runs SpamAssassin, but regardless it hasn't been a problem. I also use Thunderbird (by Mozilla) as my mail client, and it's spam filtering is superb even though I get almost nothing heading towards it (my old domain was fairly heavily spammed, TB got at least 99.5% of the spam tagged accurately and dealt with).

Just don't give your address out more than you have to, and if you get spam then do nothing to acknowledge it. Prior to registering with one site (I believe it was Vistaprint, a business card company), my old domain got nothing, but it went downhill from there. NEVER use the unsubscribe link (unless it's a legit newsletter) because that puts the address on ten more lists. I tried the "myemail DELETETHIS @ domain.com" approach on pages so robots wouldn't snag it, but most of the people I've dealt with seemed too stupid to catch on as well, and in the end accomplished nothing. Next time I need to post my address online, I'm going to just use a randomly named image that's a screencap of the address - I've seen a couple sites do this and I'd imagine it's decently effective.