Email spam is a perennial problem for everyone, whether their computer runs Mac OS, Windows OS, Linux, etc. Whereas viruses, trojans, and other nasty attachments to email tend to plague the Windows community disproportionately, the spam itself is OS agnostic -- caring only about a valid email address to deluge with annoying advertisements and bogus requests.
Having been online since the mid-90s (behind the early curve -- but almost
living online the past eight or 10 years, being a web professional), I've had my share of battles with spam.
There are two key rules that I'll state up front:
Firstly, never ever respond to a spammer. It only confirms you have a good email address.
Secondly, avoid putting your email address on the web "naked", by which I mean putting
myname@domain.com out there in plain HTML on your web site or in any documents that live on the web.
I'd always been quite careful with one email address in particular, but it only took one incident wherein a PDF was posted by a group I'm a member of -- and that PDF had my "naked" email address -- and any previous attempts at keeping myself spam-free were out the door.
So what can a Mac user do? To my mind, the first and best response is to pay $30 (a very low price for something that is so useful day-in and day-out) and buy a license for
Spam Sieve. I am not alone in my
appreciation for how useful this application is. It has
straightforward instructions and can be configured for usage with Apple's Mail, Eudora, Entourage, and Thunderbird, among other commonly used email programs.
This is pretty much 90% "set up and forget it", with only some minor action needed as you train it (if you spot some spam in your good mail or some good mail in your spam). However, if you start out with a really good group of saved spam and good mail for it to scan during the set-up, I've seen that it has a terrifically high proper-identification rate, as the image of my statistics shows.
I firmly believe that this beats any other solution, hands down -- especially for the price and ease of set-up.