Canning the spam

I have established a multilayered approach to keeping my spam in line.

Firstly I use my ISP email address in all situations where addresses are likely to be harvested. This gives me an initial filtering point as well as lets me take advantage of my ISP's Yahoo based spam blocking and tagging. I reserve my .Mac email address for friends and relatives.

Next Apple's Mail program applies its teachable filter to put "junk" mail in it's own folder. Then what got past the Yahoo filters is re-directed to my gmail account for later review. Re-directing is not the same as forwarding in that a reply from a re-directed email will go to the original sender not to the re-directer. This setup lets me quickly review my inbox to delete anything that doesn't look important, knowing that a copy is over on gmail if I need it.

I then review my junk folder when I get the chance. There is a lot of non-junk in my junk folder, emails that I might have requested or expect to receive regularly but that I don't need to keep. This establishes a natural order to the lives of my mail messages. If I see something slightly interesting in the junk but can't bring myself to drag it out to the inbox then it just slowly sinks into the mire and is gone in a week. This keeps me from holding on to those "might be useful" messages that never are.

Apple's .Mac mail system has a new alias feature that I will have to try. Its purpose is to give you the ability to create and dispose of email aliases frequently enough to prevent abuse from spammers. With up to five aliases, you could also determine exactly which sites are more likely to leave your address out where it might be grabbed.