Stopping Spam

Spam is currently 80% of all email sent over the internet. It's fairly inevitable that spammers will find out your email address, so the only help seems to be to have a spam filter.

I used to use Thunderbird, Mozilla's email program, as it had a built-in spam blocker. It caught 93% of the spam I received. In one week, out of the 482 messages I received, 27 were real, 424 were detected spam and 31 were undetected spam.

I switched to Gmail which catches almost all spam (over 99%) - I only get one or two spam emails a week now. It can include your other email accounts and can push email to an iPhone. Yahoo's pretty good too. Hotmail doesn't filter spam as well, nor can it push to an iPhone yet.

How do spammers get my email address?
One way is that spammers write programs to search web sites for email addresses. Some web sites display your email address under certain conditions, so spammers write programs to collect these addresses.

Spammers also receive lists of email addresses from employees of companies who own such lists. They may buy or even steal them.