I have recently noticed a sudden increase in spam in my email and am looking at ways of stopping or reducing it. Unlike previous spam, this spam seems to have nothing to do with any sites I have given my email address to. I have downloaded spam bouncing software but some people don't think bouncing works. I'm wondering if anybody had any anti spam suggestions.

Best solution is to have multiple email addresses. You give one email address for registering for sites/spam and the other you hold uber secret for friends and family. May not rid all spam, but I have one email address that I rarely get any emails too because of this strategy.

That's something to think about. I can see how that works for registering but what about the other spam that isn't related? How does it work?

I found the spam filter in my Thunderbird email client rather effective (I used to receive upwards 200 spams a day). Now either mail spam has dried up or my ISP has spam filters of its own so I don't see it.

Yahoo's filter is effective at separating the spam but I would rather it wasn't there at all if possible - it's just annoying!

Erisian, Companies sell email lists all the time, even ones you don't expect to like a telco or cable company. The other ones I don't trust are customer reward cards. I know your frustration, by law they should have an easy way of removing yourself from their mailing list. Filters are sometimes the only way to get rid of it, other than using different email addresses when you sign up for anything.

I might be way off key here, but I don't download any of my email. I like webmail. Anything that you can email me, I can just as good view in my browser and it isn't clogging up my hard drive tubez. As far as spam filters go, gmails are about as good as any other. I don't see spam I don't want to see. And if for some reason I might have a hankering to see my spam, it's in the spam folder. The thing with spam is, it's like dust, it will always be there and you will never have a sterile email environment. All you can do is keep it to a manageable level.

Yeah; stopped using Outlook express in 2007 and just pure webmail now EK22.

I use Firefox (Outlook), not Outlook Express for my email. It is a hotmail account. I get around 3 or 4 spams per month cuz I keep blocking them. When they go into my spam folder, I select them and go to the tab called sweep. So you are getting rid of them and also blocking them at the same time. If you just delete them, you will still get spam from that site. The more you keep blocking them as they come in, the less you will get. 3 or 4 is pretty good compared to the hundreds I was getting before.
I now have hundreds of spams in my block list.

I have used Hotmail for many years now and their new filters keep everything pretty spam free for me.
Of course i do have one email for strictly family.

I have the opposite stance Given the size of the drives these days, email disk space is peanuts. And what I have on my drive is mine, and allows me to switch to another mail provider (in fact, I can even have several mail providers and identities in the same window).