Public awareness is required to fight spam (Score 1)

Quite rightly the importance of legal measures regarding the spam are most important. But that will not happen unless public awareness steps the stage. Both legislation-wise and privacy-wise. By privacy I mean the fact that most people don't care about their private data being left on discussion boards, lists, etc.

One simple step to prevent spam is to handle your data carefully and in cases in which you need to display your data, at least obfuscate it. There are many tools to do it, e.g. obfuscatr, a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X users. It provides JavaScript or just plain hexadecimal encoding of your email. See the details at obfuscatr 1.1.0 release announcement.

Of course, there are loads of online tools that perform similarly.