Well said by John Patrick. He has a solution, digital ID, which may happen one day – I don’t know. However here are some simple steps I use and which are OK, and if enough people use them then spammers will be more discouraged:
- Create a folder called Friends and create filters for each trusted friend – that way you instantly see new mail you want to read – not one spam item will go into that folder.
- Create a folder and filter for each group or mailing-list you subscribe to. This makes groups much easier to belong to and each one spam free.
- Make a new Inbox called MyInbox or something like that. Set up a filter and put all mail addressed to you personally or cc-ed to you into MyInbox. Note that these filters should have a slighty lower priority than the Friends filter. This folder will still get some spam, but a big swag will be in the other Inbox, which should have nothing but spam, but will still need checking occasionally.
- Create a Junk folder and filter spam to that folder (especially those addressed to you personally) – you will get quick at creating filters – a couple of seconds. This spam by spam filtering is the most work for the least gain, but for all that my machine now catches 5 to 10 posts a day without me needing to do a thing.