Ouch, Spam is just ridiculous nowadays, luckily Google mail gets rid a lot of mine with only a few messages getting through the net but on my hotmail/live account I have 542 messages, 99% of which I imagine would be spam - I gave up checking it

Spam is getting worse, a lot worse, and better at breaking through filters, the key thing now would seem to be target the sources, open proxies and botnets operating in dynamic client IP space.

So far I have lost one email to the scumbag spammers, and am close to losing another, my longest serving one, my old Freeserve account.

When it changed from freeserve to Wanadoo, the spam filter was good, I was recommending them to others, and with the whitelisting option added, I no longer needed to to have my own rules to rescan marked spam for wanted newsletters.

Since Orange took over, the spam filter tuning has been very lax, had a moan about it to them but only got a drone response.

Were it not for my own anti-wildcard fiter that drops a plateful of unmarked spam into the delete folder, I’d have dumped the account before now.

For private users, it seems that churning email is inevitable, my next one is going to be long, hard to guess and even friends will only get a redirector that can be discarded if compromised.

Gmail does seem to have a reputation for good filtering, maybe they filter by source rather than by content.

I tend to use 3 addresses; a general one for one-off uses, one for ‘trusted’ sites and a temporary one.
The general address is put through the free version of Mailwasher, which bounces/deletes unwanted messages and learns in the process. The trusted one is used for those sites that don’t pass on addresses (trusting some of the people some of the time) and the temporary one for other, more suspect sites, courtesy of www.temporaryforwarding .com. This address can be deleted and reset virtually at will.
I also find that Mozilla is very good at removing spam should it slip through these precautions.