Everybody gets SPAM.
Personally I hate it in my email and I hate it out of the can. You probably feel the same way about either versions I bet. Each of us deals with it our own way. No matter what method you use, sooner or later it ends up in your inbox.
Once your email address gets sold to a spammer it is all uphill from there. I've used the same "public" email address provided by Yahoo since 1998...that's 10 years. When my spam volume was at it's height, I was recieving 150-200 spams a day. It was a literal nightmare.
Failure to read the fine print or removing checkmarks is the most common mistakes people make. Of course Yahoo's filtering system was/is something left to be desired also. Being on dial-up at that time made managing my email quite a chore. Now I spend very little time dealing with spam on a daily basis.
Now while there are several methods and solutions available...and many I have tried, I thought I would let everyone know what seems to work for me.
I have several email accounts, all of which I forward to a paid account with spamcop.net. I never reveal my spamcop.net email address. I have been with them for 5 or more years and costs $30.00/year. I believe they also have a free service.
Spamcop maintains one of the best spam filters which they also sell to ISP's around the world. User's submit spam for review and they build thier list from that. Thier spam engine digs through through email headers and discovers phony mail servers, open gateways and stuff.
I very seldom actually log on to my spamcop webmail account except to set my filter options. I retrieve my mail using Microsoft Outlook. In the Spamcop filter settings I set the how aggressive level to 6 which will let a little more spam get through. At one time I was having problems recieving some of my Yahoo Group mail because they are being filtered.
Addittionally they offer to filter mail using other popular blacklists and can block mail from entire countries. They also will send an email daily or weekly which reports the mail headers of held mail. In the last month I have only seen a couple of mails that should have gone through.
Since no email system filtering is 100% perfect I do have a secondary line of defence installed in Outlook that uses a community submitted spamlist to determine what is and isn't spam.That is iHateSpam by Sunbelt Software which you can click on the picture and get a free trial to check it out for yourself