Yes, you can greatly reduce spam. Personally, I was forced to try to do so, and the results have been very encouraging due to the investigation and planning I carried out beforehand. After suffering last year with a steadily growing volume of spam, rising to more than 200 daily, it really was necessary to take action.

Spam has many problems:

* intermingling of garbage messages and valued messages (which may then be missed)
* the distraction of receiving spam messages throughout the day as often as every few minutes.
* virus and spyware infections contained in some spam
* using of limited email server space and processor resources
* the stupid and dishonest nature of these unwanted emails, which are highly annoying

How To Avoid Being Added to Spammers' Lists

* Do not use your main email addresses on public Web sites or in list servers and discussion forums (including when you set up your account)
* If it is necessary to put an email address in public view on a Web site, use HTML techniques to disguise the address by replacing some characters with their special HTML equivalents (this does not work well for mailing lists and forums) or using JavaScript for obfuscation (this may require help setting up)
* Create one or more temporary email addresses that you can easily discard and replace if it/they become overridden by spam. Use these temporary or semi-temporary email addresses whenever in doubt about your privacy being protected. Yahoo, Hotmail, and GMail are three popular providers that allow creating of free email addresses, and there are others.
* Check the privacy policies of Web sites to which you provide email information, before providing your information. Change the default settings on those sites, if they are unfavorable initially. Be aware that some organizations do not allow you to select complete privacy.
* Use the unsubscribe links that some spams provide, but only for "responsible" companies. The unsubscribe links are effective when it is a recognizable entity sending the unwanted emails; the results of unsubscribing from an unknown, unethical spammer is less predictable.

If you have a highly spammed email address, migrate yourself to a new email address, using the information contained in the full article. It is not possible to clean a contaminated email address!

See the full article at http://www.opalcomputing.com/antispam.html for additional information, and to contact me for anti-spam assistance and in-depth Interent services.