I have my "junk address", which is the one I use on web forums and anytime I order anything, or am required to give an email address (I also have my "real" one, that I give out to friends and people I regularly correspond with). The junk mail address used to be my hotmail address, but Microsoft decided that they weren't going to allow forwarding of Hotmail to Outlook Express anymore, so I dumped both Hotmail and OE. For years I had been getting one to two hundred junk mail messages a day to my hotmail account - filtering cut it to about 50 that I would see and have to delete, but that's still a pain in the rear! I started using my gmail address as my general junk address and Thunderbird as my mailer, and I have had maybe five spam messages in the past few months!! I haven't even set up any filters yet! I am still using my Hotmail address for one time only things that I really don't care about, so a lot of junk is still being directed there. But my gmail address has been out there, in heavy use, for months and I would think it would have attracted its share of spammers. It seems to have really good junk mail filtering built in. And those few that have gotten through have been caught by Thunderbird's built in junk filter. I think the only disadvantage with gmail is that I don't believe Outlook or Outlook Express will allow forwarding from it (Microsoft really hates Google). I haven't come across any disadvantages with Thunderbird - I'm not familiar with Outlook, only Outlook Express, but Thunderbird is 1000 times better than OE. I wasn't really trying to solve the spam problem when I switched - I had been fed up with OE for a long time and the bit with Hotmail not forwarding anymore pushed me over the edge. But changing to my current setup solved the spam problem as well, so I'm twice as happy :-) BP

How you get SPAM... To begin with the bad guys send SPAM because that's how they make money, it's their job, it's how they make a living... We're talking millions of dollars here... A lot of spammers are very good at what they do and work extremely hard finding viably e-mail addresses. First off they have programs that search the internet, day and night, 24/7, checking every site and web page for anything that resembles an e-mail address... If you've posted your e-mail anywhere on the internet it's on a SPAM list somewhere... When I say anywhere I mean anywhere, on your own web page, in a Guestbook, on a forum post, MySpace, a blog, anywhere it can be seen it can be grabbed by a spammer. They also have programs that generate names for e-mail addresses, anything that can be found in a dictionary, telephone book, lists of baby names, lists of nick names and such... Anyone who has an internet connection can get a list of all the internet providers in the world... So all they have to do is tell the program to use those names with those providers... Instant SPAM list. Years ago my dial up provider gave their customers FREE web sites... To keep track of all the sites the provider used the customers e-mail addresses as the site names and then posted the list of the sites on the home page... Instant SPAM list.... ( Fortunately they've seen the error of their ways... lol ) Ever sign up for anything FREE on the internet or even registered purchased items and they asked if you wanted to be on their mailing list... Yep, instant SPAM list... Well not all the time but if you don't specify what kind of mail you want from them your address can end up on a SPAM list ( especially the FREE stuff ). Ever get a Forwarded e-mail from a friend with a zillion e-mail addresses in it that tells you to add your name to the list and send it to 10 of your friends... Yep, and if you Forward it, you just created another SPAM list. Ever get mail and you weren't quite sure who it was from or the Subject sounded interesting so you Opened it anyway.. Yep!!! You just added your address to an A #1 golden SPAM list because they know it's a good address and they can sell it to other spammers. Those are a just some of the ways they get your address... So what's the answer... Well, get a new address, pick something no one can guess with lots of letters with numbers mixed in, don't give it out to anyone, create a message rule that sends all your mail to the trash and you MAY stop the SPAM for a week or two... lol Seriously though, never, ever reply to SPAM or click on the links to be removed from their list unless you're absolutely positively sure who sent it... Sometimes reporting them to your internet provider works but after you report the first 100 or so your IP may get a little testy (lol)... Your best bet is to just delete them without opening... Sooner or later they'll slow down... Get a free e-mail account to use for registering for stuff, your internet friends and stuff like that... Only use the e-mail account from your internet provider for family and really close computer savvy friends... BTW, Rules to block e-mail addresses or IP's won't work because they use phony addresses... But, you could make a Rule like this.... Where the from line contains people not in my address book, Delete from Server... But the problem with that is if your friends change their e-mail address before telling you their mail won't get through, same goes for replies from any mail you send out to people not in your address book... Rita

Delilah - I have a bunch of email addresses for various purposes - outlook, gmail, yahoo and comcast. My primary email address that I use for people I know and important matters is comcast but I'm shifting some things to gmail. I use yahoo for anything online - anything I think will lead to a lot of advertising/SPAM. Outlook is relatively new since I switched to Office 365. I use it only for my local neighborhood activities and have a separate contact list in there. The rest of my contacts are in gmail. Ya, that shared email with spouse thing is very strange in my opinion. And for anyone in the market for a job - having an AOL email address is likely to make you the victim of age discrimination as soon as a prospective employer sees it and Yahoo is probably similar.

I used to have multiple Yahoo email accounts back when Yahoo clubs and IM were popular in the early 2000s. I had German, Italian, and French accounts (*.de, *.it, and *.fr), and I decided to pretend to be a woman (Thérèse D'Extase) for my French Yahoo profile, and she was also a dominatrix. Unfortunately, this attracted too many friend requests from men in Switzerland and France. I did have a fair number of friends through my German and Italian profiles, but I did get tired of chatting in German and Italian (sometimes at the same time), although I did find it good practice for switching between languages at the drop of a hat - something that I am not the best at doing. I had a long chat in German once through one of the German Yahoo groups only to find out that he was in Los Angeles and American. I lost interest in Yahoo after they stopped supporting clubs. My brother and I had a club called "Venice Beach Bros" and we did meet a few local people through that club, including Bathtub Girl, who used to have podcasts from her bathtub in Venice, just a few blocks from our house. After a while, I found the Yahoo popup IMs to get annoying. At that time I was also doing web design and hosting, and I managed POP email accounts for our clients. I really prefer this time of email to the free email, partly because it allowed me to save emails on hard drives.