Once your email address get known to the spammers then essentially you are doomed to receive spam for the rest of eternity. You can follow the rules such as never replying and hope that it will eventually go away. Sadly it won't. The only solution is to start afresh with a new address and to try and keep this one out of their clutches. Here's how.

Firstly you are going to need an addresss based on your own domain, e.g. fred@fredbloggs.co.uk. Secondly you are going to need that domain hosted on a service for which:-
a) you can set up a catch-all such that mail for undefined accounts, for example eric@fredbloggs.co.uk are routed to your proper email address.
b) you can define a mailbox to go to a "black hole" such that the mail is immediately deleted.
Domains and hosting accounts can be acquired at very reasonable rates, so shop around for these.

Then you follow the rule that you only give out your real email address to friends and trusted business associates. In particular, never use this email address when signing up for anything on the internet. Instead, supposing you are registering for ProductX then give your email address as productx@fredbloggs.co.uk. Because of the catch-all, this will route automatically, so you will still receive the emails. And if you subsequently start to receive spam on productx@fredbloggs.co.uk then you can give it the black hole treatment.

If you have a web site which advertises your email addresses then there are further measures needed to protect these. That will be the subject of tomorrow's blog.

You can ignore what follows, it's just there so we can claim our blog at Technorati: Technorati Profile

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