There's always a thread here about dealing with spam, and plenty of advice about how to filter, sort and otherwise handle it.
Wouldn't it be better to not get it in the first place?
I rarely get spam, even though I have quite a large online presence and I thought I would share how I do it.
Get yourself a domain, I use Easily.co.uk, but there are plenty of others offering similar services and different pricing structures. I paid £9.99 for my .org domain for the first 2 years, I recently renewed it for £30 for the year.
With the domain, you get redirection of up to 20 addresses to your mail account. (I still use my NTL account for this).
A lot of spam addresses are harvested online, so you should be careful who you give your "real" address to.
The redirect system has an address for "unknown addresses", so set up the addresses you want:
me@mydomain.org = my@ntl
thewife@mydomain.org = thewife@ntl
another@mydomain.org = whoever@wherever
All other addresses are redirected to your default "unknown" address (in my case, my NTL address, the same as
me@mydomain.org)
Here's the trick:
If you need to give an email address online and you don't really trust that it won't be put on a spam list, make one up. You usually need to receive this mail to get a password or similar. The address I used for this forum was
nthell@mydomain.org, Because It's unknown to the redirect, it comes to me anyway.
If I start getting spam on that address, I just redirect it! sent it straight to abuse@nthell.
You never need to see the spam again, your primary address is protected, and you get to keep the same primary address as long as you have the domain, regardless of how many times you change ISP.
Everybody's happy!