For some people spam is a nuisance. They are the lucky ones. For most spam goes beyond a minor irritation and causes many lost hours of productivity every year. There are as many ways to fight spam as there are for spammers to circumvent those methods, but one method that has fairly good results is the use of a buffer address. Consider the big three free web based email providers and how they combat spam. Hotmail has a black list, a whitelist and a junkmail filter. Yahoo also has a block sender list(black list), custom filters and spamguard, which is a form of communcal Bayesian filter. Yahoo's latest beta version also includes disposable e-mail addresses as a direct measure against spam. The idea here is you have your main email address, and then you 'tack a bit onto it' that you casn use until you get too much spam through it, then you change the added on bit, effectively giving you a new email address. Gmail has the fewest options regarding spam, but it also seems to be very efficient in it's use of these options. All three have a delete button and a spam button, meaning that when you delete a message they are recording that you are deleting it because it is spam. This probably means they are combining a personal and a communal bayesian filter in their efforts to fight spam. Any one of these services can be used as a buffer address, eliminating a significant portion of spam before you see it. Yahoo is a clear winner in offering weapons to fight spam, but sadly they undo most of this good work by putting their own spam on your pages. Big flashy adds that distract from the purpose of the site - namingly delivering you your email. A more advanced use of buffer addresses is to use the forwarding features of the webmails to send the messages on to your primary account. Thus you can publicly use the webmail, and all your messages are put through it's filters before being sent on to you.