How to avoid spam, how to filter spam, and how to complain about spam:
- Stop Spam with Disposable Email Addresses (disposable email address will forward all mail to your real address)
Don't Use Your Primary Email Address to Sign Up for Anything. Many Web sites require you to sign up to access their services. You never know what will happen to the email address you give to the site.
- Hackers may break into the network and steal the email address,
- it may leak to the Web due to some mishap, or
- it might even get sold to spammers.
As soon as you get spam through a disposable address, you disable it, and all messages (and all spam) sent to the disposable address bounce back to the sender instead of your Inbox.
- Change the default (catch-all) address (where all email will be delivered if the mailbox specified does not exist) for your account to ":fail: no such address here."
- Report Spam with SpamCop (http://www.spamcop.net/)
Complain about spam the right way easily with SpamCop, which does all the analyzing for you and generates a perfect complaint email, too.
- Hide Email Address from Harvester Bots / Spiders and Disguise Your Email Address in Newsgroups, Forums, Blog Comments, Chat
Make it more difficult for spammers to get your address by obfuscating it when you use it in your Website, newsgroups, forums and the like.
- Ignore Delivery Failures of Messages You Did Not Send
If you wonder why you are getting delivery failures for messages you know you did not send, the cause may be a worm or a spammer, and it's probably not on your computer. However, if you do get a lot of delivery failure messages, you may have a worm on your computer. - Use email filter such as Spam Assassin. Spam Assassin is an automated mail filter that uses a wide range of heuristic algorithms on mail headers and message body text to identify "SPAM" (unsolicited email). Once identified, the mail is tagged as "SPAM" for later filtering using the user's desktop mail client. For more info visit http://www.spamassassin.org/
- Use a Good Anti-Spam Program
Employ one of the great anti-spam tools (e.g., POPFile Spam Filter & Thunderbird) that filter junk mail using all kinds of clever strategies.
- Don't Believe Spammers When They Say "You Requested"
There are two words that you will find in almost any unsolicited bulk email: you requested - Don't believe it. - Anti-Phishing Protection - Watch for increasingly common email scams - also known as “phishing” - which try to fool you into handing over your passwords and other personal information.
- Assume Mail from Unknown Senders is Spam
Send messages not from somebody in your address book to the Junk Mail folder. You can also use challenge/response spam filters.
- Watch Out for Those Checkboxes
Make sure you don't opt in for emails you don't want, and watch out for checkboxes when you submit any form on a Web site.
SOURCE: http://email.about.com/od/spamfightingtips/tp/popular_tips.htm
Compiled by Ron Elli, Ph.D. - SOURCiS
