A major tool for fighting spam has nothing to do with software or computers. Common sense can do a lot to reduce the amount of spam you receive, and may eventually reduce the amount of spam that is sent. Avoid clicking on links contained in spam messages, NEVER buy from spammers! They send spam to make money, if no one buys from them, there will be less of them willing to put in the time and effort to send out all that spam. Create another email account (at netscape, yahoo, gmail, etc.) and use that only to respond to those rare messages you find intriquing, but are probably spam.

Spam sucks - I hate spam, it used to annoy me, now I enjoy stifling it, thanks to some open source software that has the situation under control.

Many of the tools I use to fend off spam require some technical tinkering to get set up and configured. One exception to that is Thunderbird, an email client that has a very effective filter that adaptively learns which of the messages you receive are good and which are spam.

One wonderful tool for dealing with the garbage being transmitted to your email accounts is SpamAssassin. Another really nice anti-spam tool is MIMEDefang which uses SpamAssassin for some of its bag of tricks.

Personally, I use SpamAssassin, MIMEDefang, and Sieve along with my usual linux tools for email. MIMEDefang works as an in-line filter using SpamAssassin to detect spam as it is being delivered. Spam can be flagged, diverted to another mailbox, or the delivery of the message can be rejected. I've come to think of dealing with spam as a game thanks to a few handy tools.

There will be some more material about these tools sometime soon, for now there are a few Anti-Spam links with info on these and other tools.

SpamAssassin is written in perl and there are easy ways to adapt it to nip the most annoying spammers in the bud. A new pattern of spam appears, and most of the time one line of perl will stifle that wave. Then the rest of those Rolex, Viagra, whatever messages go straight to the bit bucket. Since I am a perl programmer, I tend to choose to tinker with the code to get it to do what I need. Much can be be accomplished just by adjusting the scores used to classify messages and by using various sources of blacklists to block the worst spammers.