[bobwaters]

Unlikely. I'm the owner of six Yahoo groups, and a member of a couple of times that many, and I've usually used the email address my ISP provided for them. While I get occasional spam- who doesn't?- it's rare, and if being an active participant in fifteen or eighteen groups and running six others doesn't attract spam, I think you can assume that it's just too inefficient a place to harvest email addresses for spammers to bother with much. For one thing, a large percentage of users use Yahoo mail, which is a much richer source of victims (though spam suppression software helps). It's easier just to go after the Yahoo mail accounts everybody who has a Yahoo membership gets.

A bigger danger is that you could tick off an immature or disturbed person who could choose to harrass you through your email account. I'm in the process of taking action against such a person right now. But I actually would see something like fastmail as an ideal way to participate in Yahoo groups. If you did get spammed excessively, you could just close your account and open another one here.

All in all, I'd say that while the chances of attracting spam by joining a Yahoo group are real, they are minimal. And if push comes to shove, there's always the option of visiting the group webpage and posting directly, thereby eliminating the problem of an email address altogether. You might then be able to conceal your email address from the public entirely.

Bob