John,

I've tried just about all of the things mentioned here. It's a running battle to keep this crud out of your mail, no matter how you manage it.

I use Earthlink, which merged a number of years ago with Mindspring, the originator of the "Spaminator" program. I use that, and though some spam gets through, I'd say 75-90% it gets caught. It does go in cycles, as new banks of spam addresses are introduced, there's a learning curve for the program. It doesn't cost me any extra to use it, and with multiple email accounts, it works for all of them. Spaminator relies on reports from users, however, to work properly. So though I just delete spam often enough, it builds in volume until I take the time to open the spam header (always examine the size to be sure you're not opening a worm or virus), copy the whole thing into a new mail and send it to spaminator@earthlink.net. Spam in my mailbox drops off again, and when I visit my account every day or two at Spaminator, I delete a couple of pages at a time (20 per page).

Pegasus has some pretty good filters. Eudora has a fee program for a filter I've never used. Yahoo mail has a way to block messages, and I would think that if you put an * in the right field, you could block anything with * in the subject line. You always have the option to scan the list of spam before deleting (though most of these will automatically empty after a couple of weeks) and tweaking it so legitimate mail gets past the filter.

My biggest concern are the browsers. IE and Netscape go out merrily on their way, advertising my email address wherever I go. I tried blocking it in my Netscape, and had to reset my email again before I could receive any. But that is one idea--to simply go into your browser and remove your email address so it can't leave that behind wherever you browse. You'll have to go back an manually replace it any time you want to check your email if it is connected with a browser. I also subscribe to Anonymiser, because there are times when I'm doing web searches, such as through Google, that no matter what the topic, you're bound to hit sneaky sites that have put keywords in their metadata to get them included in searches. You'll leave behind a lot of information if you're not using a firewall or other software to block the transmission.

So the answer to one of John's questions is that yes, I have one address in particular that I've had for a long time that one of these days I hope to close down and leave the spam behind, but that isn't really the answer. I've brow beat (and probably lost) a few friends for sending long lists of names any time they send a petition or a piece of humor. I used to send humor frequently, but in the last couple of years, I send very little, and generally send it individually. BCC is the feature to use when sending to mulitiple people so everyone doesn't get the names, but something tells me that the list isn't as secure as I'd like it to be. Anyway, when your address is in one of those horrible long emails that someone sends in which several other Luddite senders have not figured out to clean it up so forward it addresses and all, it's a really good chance that someone equally dense along the way is going to post it somewhere, with all of those addresses, and your email is there for any bot to harvest.

Some days email is just a pain in the a**.

SRS