fighting the losing battle with spam

So I created a new email address for myself recently and my inbox was totally free from spam for a few weeks. Then, poof! - one client adds me to their "mailing list" and I suddenly start receiving sales pithes for Rolexes, Viagra and Fentraphen again. Now I could easily spend my days trying to create and tweak filters that scan my email for spam, but I find that this is a losing battle. It either becomes a weekly chore to add additional keywords and misspellings to the filter, or you end up going too vague and filtering out valid emails from customers. I could also depend on my ISP to do the filtering for me, but I have yet to discover an ISP that can successfully filter the bad from the good. The new year is a great time to switch emails. It's almost expected. I actually like to include the year in my email address. That way, if any of my contacts miss the message about my email address getting changed, they may guess the new one when they see that the year no longer matches the current year. Some might say that spammers would make the same assumption, but that would assume that email harvesters and spammers are physically viewing their email lists, which I seriously doubt.

In the end, I'm thinking that the best thing to do is to provide a specially filtered and forwarded email address for each client. It sounds like a lot of work, but it isn't really. You create a new address for each client when you first meet, and that's it. This would also make email filtering into folders a little easier.