I use a very simple system with my incoming email addresses that reduce spam to almost zero.

If you have your own domain or if your ISP allows you to setup aliases/forwrding to your real email address it is simple.

Whenever you deal with a new company, set-up a new email address. Whenever you have to open an account with a company say its called spammers inc. 🙂 After all most, if not all companies only want your details to spam you with marketing or pass your details on for a profit. Anyway, create a forwarding address to your real email address called from_spammers_inc@yourdomain.co.uk If you later start to get junk mail from anyone other than spammers inc on that address you know they have passed your email address on.

You can simply delete the forwarding or point it at the unknown recipient black hole if your IPS provides that. No more spam from them. Of course you won’t get any more mail from Spammers inc., but they cannot be trusted anyway. So why deal with them any more.

If you use Thunderbird as your email client there is a feature where you can set multiple identities when sending emails. This is a bit of magic so that when you reply to a mail Thunderbird will generally 🙂 select the correct return address for you. If not just select it from the drop down menu.

If you do have to put your email address on a web page, “to sign in”, :-(, always use one which you can live without. When the scum of the earth spammers, start you can again just delete the forwarding and the spam stops instantly.

The spam is still hitting your mail server but you no longer see it. To stop the mail from hitting your mail server use fail2ban to ban the IP addresses of spammers 🙂 Personally, I have banned all the IP addresses from China.net. Doing so cut the hit rate on my server by about 80%.