Spam is the killer application since it kills your mail box by flooding it. If you publish your email address then you get so many unsolicited emails that you won’t be able to distinquish your geniune emails from junk. If you don’t publish, then people won’t know how to contact you.
One of my mail boxes gets a lot of spam, since I used to write online articles where that email address was the published address. Recently the hosting company which is hosting that website enabled Spamassassin on the site. Spam assassin is able to identify more than 99% of the spam mails correctly. It does a very intelligent scanning, gives points for each of the criteria of a SPAM mail. When a mail exceed a certain points, it gets marked as a SPAM. Its totally flexible where you can define the number of points as well as define your own criteria or ask it to ignore some. It also puts **SPAM** in the subject line so you can configure your mail client filter out emails if the subject has **SPAM**
So far this is working well, better than I expected. I don’t even wait for my mail client to catch it, I log in to the Web based front and delete all mails marked as spam. If this works well, I hope to get this working on all my mail boxes so I have a spam free world. Good bye spam for now.