Try searching Google™ for a free webmail or email service. The likes of Yahoo! ™ Mail offer some limited form of spam protection as well as other useful features. The fact that they're web based means that you can identify spam email without having to download it to your computer first.

Many of the free email providers maintain member directories. Make sure you decline the option of being a listed member otherwise you will be sabotaging your own efforts! These options are often provided during registration so keep your eyes open for them.

Use email redirection

With certain Internet domain name registrars, you have the ability to set up email redirection with domains you register through them. For example, if you register yourdomain.co.uk and then set up two email forwarders; one for personal and one for work purposes. Let's say these are personal@yourdomain.co.uk and work@yourdomain.co.uk. You can configure the forwarding such that any emails being sent to these email addresses automatically get forwarded onto other email addresses without the sender of the email knowing where their email is actually going to.

personal@yourdomain.co.uk -> your main ISP email account

work@yourdomain.co.uk -> your office email account

The likes of 123-reg offer domain names at very reasonable prices and without the catches you get with some other registrars. Best of all, they allow you to forward email to 100 different addresses so if you find that one particular email address gets a lot of spam then you can simply stop using it, turn the redirection off and create a new forwarding address!

Screen your email

There are applications made specifically for the job of filtering spam email. These vary in terms

of functionality so you should always ensure that they can perform the basic functions such as displaying an email as plain text. This means that any embedded tracking graphics aren't rendered on your screen so the sender has no way of knowing whether or not you've actually opened the message.

Cure - How To Rescue An Email Address From Spam Hell

Whether or not you can rescue an email address from drowning in irrelevant email depends on the spammers and the methods they use. Some will just keep on spamming regardless. Others will remove your address from their target lists if they detect that it doesn't exist. This helps them to maintain the quality of their lists.

The best thing you can do to reduce the amount of spam you receive into any particular email address is to avoid previewing and opening suspect emails by using a filtering application on your computer. Simply ignoring emails isn't always enough because unless they receive an error message, spammers may just assume that any email they sent must have reached a recipient. The more advanced email filtering software will provide you with the ability to bounce emails identified as spam. This is effectively mimicking an email sent by your email provider to the spammer to inform them that the email account they've tried to send email to doesn't exist.

There's a Windows email filtering application that I use and recommend. It's called MailWasher Pro. Sitting quietly in your taskbar tray, it checks your email accounts for email at regular intervals. Any email found is then partially (or fully) downloaded and analysed using sophisticated threat detection algorithms. MailWasher Pro also allows you to read a plain text version of any email sent to you. Viewing emails loaded with tracking images in this way is safe to do. Emails that have been analysed will be marked according to how they are scored. Spam can be automatically marked for deletion and a bounce email can be returned to the sender to mimic a non-existent account (use this feature with caution as the return email address may well be spoofed and not actually belong to the spammer at all).

There's also a companion application to MailWasher Pro called Benign. It does the job of sitting in-between the Internet and your email application, acting like a doorman by stripping out any dangerous or malicious code (e.g. viruses, worms, scripts, web bugs) before it reaches your inbox.