Bruce,

I have a couple of Yahoo accounts and with the bulk mail settings I've used there I rarely get spam. They're both rather quiet at the moment, but even when I'm subscribed to discussion lists with them, very little spam comes my way.

Here's a bit new to add to the discussion:

I've been seeing a new type of blocking problem on the Earthlink Spaminator. I get tons of spam there, and it goes in spurts when a lot gets through to my regular mail box, then it dies off. Mail often comes with an email address it lets the recipient see (if it pretends to be from PayPal, then there is a conspicuous PayPal "reply" address), but embedded in the post's header is the *real* address the response will go to. My system's solution is to pop up with a dialog box and offer you the option to block both addresses.

But now I'm seeing unblockable addresses like this (with my portion of it xx'ed out since this is going out in public)

dlbdirect-bounce-catcher-xxxxxx=sprynet.com@dlb-direct.com

And I receive the following response from Spaminator:

We are sorry. Your Address Book is unable to handle the address below because it contains unsupported or invalid characters.
Please correct the address if possible and click OK. Otherwise, please click on "spamBlocker" to continue your session.

It may be the = sign in the address that throws it out, but the result is that I can't block that address unless (I have discovered) I go in and manually delete my portion of the email address from its sequence. I don't know if it ends up blocking anything.

SRS