E-mail spam filters and blockers, do they work?

I’ve been reading a post of Uroš Gruber about spam. We all know about it and we all can’t get rid of it. But there are some ways of how to keep your inbox cleaner and spam free for a longer time.

I personally use Thunderbird and have set-up some personal spam filters, that automatically delete some spam emails. The problem is, that sometimes it also deleted non-spam ones too. You just need to ban the worst keywords you find in those useless mails.

The problem isn’t when you get a new spam email to your inbox. The problem starts when a spammer gets a list of thousands of email addresses and starts to send crap to them. These lists are worth very much and can cost about $10.000 or even more.

There are some ways you need to know about, on how not to get on these kind of lists. Here are some:

• Don’t send those chain letters, forward or reply to them.

  If you look closely at them, there may be hundreds of emails in it. a good way for spammers to add new victims to their list.

• On your blogs or sites, don’t type in your email in text like my.name@email.com or even my.name [at] email.com. Spammers are clever and they developed their own crawlers/spideres who save and change this to a working email.

  One way is to use forms for this (there are a lot of good Wordpress plugins for this, or free script available on the internet) or write the email in a picture using Painter or some other software and then add it to your site.

• There are a lot of free services on the internet, where they say write your email and you’ll get free ringtones and similar stuff. Now why would you get free stuff for just a email? Because it’s added to a spam list and you’ll get daily spam emails again. A solution would be to have more than 1 email address where you keep one clean and the other one for services that don’t have a big name and aren’t trustworthy. As for big companies like Google, Yahoo, youtube etc. feel free to use your clean email since these sites won’t sell your email.

I get daily about 100 spam emails or more and i have quite some accounts too so cleaning these things up is taking me a lot of time. I even lost some clients because of spam
If anyone has any more info on good spam filters or spam blockers, feel free to add them to the comment