A question I get quite frequently, and justifiably is how to get rid of spam once I've already started getting it.

A short history of how you get spam.
Generally it starts because you either (a) post your email address on the internet somewhere, or (b) you give your email address to someone who then sells it to spammers.

So avoid that from now on. If you must post your email address somewhere, or you must give it to suspicious companies, create a hotmail account and use that for all suspicious email address needs.

But now that you've got it, what to do:
You basically have 3 options (besides doing nothing :) presented here in increasing order of effectiveness.

1. Stop spam before it comes to you. This will have to be done by your ISP - or whomever you get your email from. It's a service you can request. Most ISP's have some form of spam prevention, but it rarely goes far enough. The fear of false positives keeps them from being too aggressive.
2. Stop spam as soon as it gets to you. This is the solution I use. It's the second most effective, and works quite well for me. I receive around 200 spam messages a day, this catches nearly all of them (90+%). There are 2 technologies I use and recommend. The first is the new Outlook 2003. This is the Outlook that comes with the new version of Office that came out Q4 of 2003. It has automatic spam blocking and does a fairly good job. It's not required, but it works well. The second tool I recommend is Cloudmark's Spamnet. I love this tool because it really saved me from spam. You pay $4/mo now (I was an early bird and I pay $2) and it does a very good job of blocking spam. It works on a peer review system. In other words, fellow users of Spamnet get spam and can then "block it." Once it's blocked by a few users, it is automatically blocked for all other users. Pretty good system.
3. Force all email senders to verify their legitimacy. This is the most effective way to block spam, but a little drastic for my business uses so I don't use it. I recommend it to people who mostly use email for personal stuff. It's called "challenge and response" spam blocking. It works like this [or click demo video here]. You subscribe to the service. When someone sends you an email it triggers an email right back to them. One time only they have to do go through a little verification process to verify that they are a legit mailer. Takes just a few seconds. Once they do, the email is sent on to you. From then on, that person can email you without problem. The key is that spammers can't afford to go through that process so they don't ever get through. The most popular of these tools is called SpamArrest. It costs $35/yr.

Need a hand getting it all set up? Drop me a note I'm happy to help you get started.