Bothered by Spam? I may have a solution for you: GMail. You know GMail…the free online mail service run by, as everything in the Universe will someday be, the people at Google.
I've mentioned GMail here before but with reservations. Its Spam filter wasn't the greatest, I thought. I routed duplicates of some of my incoming mail through GMail for a time and it was letting an awful lot of Cialis ads through while flagging almost any message that came from somebody in the comic book industry as a probable scam. There's a lesson in there.
They seem to have improved it. A few weeks ago, just as a test, I set my normal e-mail address to route duplicate copies into a GMail address and then, after a while, I went to check. There were about a thousand messages in my box there — about 600 correctly identified as Spam and moved into the Spam folder for easy deletion. There were only three false I.D.s of legit mail as Spam and all three were mass mailings from washingtonpost.com. Another lesson.
I had about a dozen unwanted e-mails identified as Kosher but that's not bad, given the volume. No Spam filtering method is going to bat a thousand…and you wouldn't want that. You'd want it to err on the side of not labelling an arguable message as junk mail.
So how can this help you? You have a primary e-mail address that everyone knows. It's probably pretty easy for you to set that address up to forward to another address. So you get a Gmail address and set that primary address to forward to the Gmail one. Then you pick your messages up from the Gmail address, where almost all the Spam will be tidily diverted into the Spam folder. You can log into Gmail and read and answer your desired messages online there…or if you're using an offline reader like Outlook or Eudora or Agent, you set the offline reader to pick your mail up from the Gmail address.
If you do the latter, you might want to log in to the Gmail address every week or so and quickly scan the headers in the Spam folder, just to make sure there's nothing getting in there that you want. If some friend's messages keep winding up in there amongst the Nigerian banking proposals, you add that friend to the Gmail address book and his messages will not be diverted any longer.
Because of this site, I get a lot of Spam — some weeks, upwards of 20,000 pieces. I tried a number of Spam filters, some of them quite pricey. The Gmail method is free and does a better job than any of them…which is not to suggest it's perfect. Just better than any alternative I've tried.