Is $40 too much to pay for a year of hosting on a very decent web server? Where you can make whatever email addresses you want, at whim. Each with IMAP, POP3 and WebMail access, plus optional forwards, auto-responders and server-side spam filtering... Supports all the current web goodies; PHP, PERL, MySQL (you can have 2 databases), multiple domain parking on the same site, sub-domain creation, etc... Fairly nice control panel too.

If you're going to register or buy a domain name, you should really dump the idea of running on a free feature-less host.

You can (should) use NMS Formmail (or other "secure") method to have people contact you. Don't use MSA (Matt's) Formmail. Otherwise you can put up a graphic image with low-contrast distortions and your email address written within it and let people copy out your email address by hand.

If you can click (a link) and have it pop the email address into an email client, then it's of no use to stop spam.

Bruno