As some of you know already Bayesian filters are currently the last fort resisting the flood of spam that palagues everyone using non webmail services...

I just found POPFile that appart from being free, is relatively easy to set up (you do have to RTFM) and has a record of high efficiency.

So if you feel, like I do, that you just can't spend another hour sifting through the garbage in your inbox, head to:

http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

Midas, is POP mail more subject to spam than webmail? haven't used POP for a long time. Gmail makes me lazy, even though I don't totally love it. I wuz thinking of setting up another desktop mail system, but I had forgotten about spam.

I guess Google can easily recognize spam. I see it mentioned, but it hasn't been a concern for quite awhile now. Sometimes I need to do a keystroke to flick a spam message out of the way, but that's all.

I really don't know which is the more spam prone... I mentioned non webmail because most of the webmail providers have some sort of functionality to collect spam into separate folders (not that it works all that good with most, gmail being a relevant exception...).

As for POP it depends on who supplies it and the use you make of that address... If you keep it private and doesn't reside in some high profile server, you're probably ok. But in the long run, it will come to you -- the spam, that is

Another good free anti-spam tool is located at:

http://www.spamgourmet.com

Cheerio

A couple of years ago I experimented--apparently successfully--with changing a registered ADSL account name to something that looked more like a password than a name.

Of course spammers grab any address they can, in any way they can, so if your name is exposed (such as on a website), they "will come to you," as you said, Midas. But one of the methods used does involve computer generation of likely names, so in order of susceptibility:

Martha
Martha67
mgt54--;jktyu9'-

I tried something along the lines of the third one. I just thought it might be worth the effort. --Keep in mind, though: I don't have a website.--

It worked. For the first week I thought I was getting off easy for awhile. After a month of no spam whatever, I thought it was a long while. About a year later, when I let that account go because I switched everything to Gmail, it was still getting no spam.

The downside was that you couldn't easily tell a friend your e-mail address was
mgt54--;jktyu9'-@ringaling.net
but I reasoned that we usually trade addresses by back-and-forth e-mail anyway, and we don't often "write down" e-mail addresses that we transcribe later. In this case, writing down the address would admittedly be a lot less easy than writing down "martha@ringaling.net".

Whatever works. I had read that one method used in the spam industry is the computer generation of likely alphanumeric addresses. This non-alphanumeric name technique worked for me.