Strategies for Dealing with Email Spam?

Question

I've been receiving junk mail recently at an incredible rate. Outlook had some trouble filtering them out at first, but it seems like it's finally caught on. Unfortunately, I still feel like I can't avoid looking through the junk folder though because I'll inevitably miss something I need that gets thrown in there.What strategies do you have for dealing with spam? Aliases and filtering rules? Are particular providers better at dealing with it? Do I just dump this address for a new one?

LinuxBender · Accepted Answer

Anecdotally I moved some really old domains to fastmail and set the spam global rules to move anything with a spam score of 4+ to the spam folder and to delete anything 10+ and I receive no spam. This is not enabled by default. One of the domains I moved had several email addresses that had been leaked to the worst of the worst spammers.For the sites that are not technically spam because I signed up for them, I have rules that move their emails to a folder and mark them as read. One can set retention of each folder. So if I realize I might have needed to view one of the emails, I can look for it but if I don't then it eventually goes away without bothering me.

beardyw · Answer

Over the years I have tried to compartmentalise by creating different email addresses:
1. a very old Yahoo address which I never care about unless I need to validate a sign up - a swamp of spam
2. a Gmail address I use for companies I buy from regularly - sadly now badly spammed
3. a Gmail address I use for money/banks and health only - not spammed yet
4. an account on my domain used by friends and family - spammed rarely
5. a Gmail account I use to consolidate the above (including spam) except #1 and where I read mail. By accidentally using it as a "from" in replies I do get some direct emails and a little direct spam.
Theory and practice turn out to be different.

BlameKaneda · Answer

I created a Gmail account that's specifically for email signups and shut off the notifications for it.I traveled over the summer and relied heavily on free WiFi, which meant me signing up and giving them my email. I knew that I was going to be bombarded with spam, so I created the junk account to handle all of it.