I recommend that you
www.spamex.com
Instead of trying to wash / filter your incoming mail, spamex takes a more proactive approach.
[NOTE: This only works if you start over with a new email address]
spamex lets you create 100s of disposable email addresses , e.g.
8dlw-23dos@spamex.com WHen you register at a website, you create a new disposable email addresses just for that website. (Spamex has a toolbar hotlink to pop a dialog, making it easy to do) You can also create disposable email addresses to give to people. Instead of a random name, you can assign your own custom name to each disposable email address.
Later, if you get some spam, the email message is annotated by spamex to indicate which disposable email address it was sent to. This allows you to find out who sold/shared your email address. You can then delete the disposable email address,
which plugs the leak.
I have been using this for almost 1 year now, and I almost never get spam. (Compare to before where I got 100+ spam messages in my yahoo mail account per day).
Some tips: For your real email address you should use a long, difficult to guess name, because some spammers use brute force lexigraphic attacks where they spam common names and variations hoping to get a few suckers to reply/click the 'remove me from this list button', etc. Also, I give disposable email addresses even to my family because you never know if they will put your email address in some web form like "Send a greeting card to
johnny@aol.com".
Here is a 2/25/2003 review of spamex on PCMagazine
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,844064,00.asp
You can also do a search on google for "disposable email" and you will find some other companies which offer this service. I only have experience with spamex.
Fleance (Spam Free At Last!)