5 Things You Should Know about Spam Filtering:

Everybody online gets spam. You can't avoid it anymore than you can the junk mail that the letter carrier brings. There are some things that you can do about it.

1. Build up your own internal junk mail filters and use the delete key. This is the simplest and, depending on the volume of mail that you get, the most effective way to deal with it.
2. Don't make yourself a target. Be prudent about where you leave your e-mail address and look carefully at the page for those little check boxes beside the 'Send me offers from ____'. If you've made your own web page do not under any circumstances subscribe to one of the services which promise to list your site in thousands of 'search engines and directory listings'. I can tell you from bitter experience that the listings aren't worth having and your inbox will be flooded with junk e-mail (over 800 in about 36 hours and residuals forever).
3. Set up your e-mail to filter for you. Each e-mail program has the capacity to define criteria by which incoming mail is examined and some action is taken. You will find that you can establish quite complex rules for very fine filtering. I suggest that you do not use the 'Delete' option but move offending mail into a holding folder. From time to time you can take a moment to give the messages in that folder a cursory glance before deleting them just in case an important one ran afoul of your rules.
4. Become a spam vigilante. If you set your mail to view all of the headers you can see where the mail came from. With a little effort, help from a site like combat.uxn.com (note there is no 'www' in the address), and a lot of practice you can track down the offending persons service provider and send your complaint to them. Responsible ISPs do not tolerate spammers using their service.
   Unfortunately the preceeding has long since ceased to be true. Spammers have become so good at covering their tracks that the chances of getting back to the source are nill.
5. Do not send a complaint to the return address in a spam message or attempt to unsubscribe if you don't recall signing up. That will only result in your name being added to the spammers list one more time.