I was just reminded on the similar thread about scammers of a satisfying way to return a little of the aggravation to spammers they give us. Another person I know was asking everyone what she could do to slow them down, and though this is more satisfying than effective, if done for say 1 hour per week by each recipient as a habit it may well become effective and make spam a dying method of marketing.

All you do, is link to credit or mortgage companies' sites through their spam mails, and then start filling in their application forms. As long as, for instance, you put in a couple of genuine places, you can put in any other nonsense you like and the site accepts the form, saying they will contact you, Mr Orinoco Womble from Wimbledon Common, or wherever, within three working days to let you know if your loan has been approved.
Obviously, there are many online forms and other ways you will find to keep these companies a little busier than ususal, and if 1 in a million people replied in this way (that is the figure they all work on for being in profit, one sale from a million spam mails) or hopefully more, they may have to take on more staff - to delete emails. Or worse, if we're lucky.

I didn't want to change my primary e-mail address but receiving 60 spam mails this morning finally convinced me that this was the only answer. Unfortunately, changing the ISP logon user name also affects the web site address, search engine presence and any links to graphics or pages etc. That number one Google spot for my website has now evaporated. Oh well, I'm not selling anything so it isn't that important.

You'd think that just typing the the new URL into the browser would find my web site. No such luck! It doesn't. Going into the webspace using the new user name reveals that there are no files there! I have a copy of my site stored on the hard drive but I'm not going to bother uploading the files to the new site address yet until I see how the SPAM goes. I may need to change the address again if the spammers find me. You'll notice that I have uploaded my spinning cube though!

I don't know how the SPAM got so bad but it's realy nice to see it stopped now that the old e-mail address no longer exists.

I am also thinking of changing my email address! Gee you only got 60 spam emails? I get over 200 a day and I am sick to death of trying to get rid of them.How or why I get so many is beyond me but I am fed up to the teeth and so I will call my ISP provider and get them to help me change a few things.
I did send a few spam back to where they came from with a short terse note and I haven't heard back or gotten any more email from them.
PF

I found that my friend on Yahoo gets no spam at all (though he doesn't use the internet, only email). Using some sites will spread your email up to a point, and then the 'muppets' or 'cretins' who abuse them will start again, but I would also like to know if Yahoo then use a filter which still keeps them out, as many Hotmail spams I get are sent to randomly generated addresses so would come whether you surf or not. Mind you, my friend's address is so unusual noone would make it up at random, so maybe by having a hard to invent address would help as well (unlike satguru, as I discovered.) So that would probably be the first to try if you're going to change addresses.

I fought spam for years and was fairly successful. I would use trace, whosit to find the originating server administrators and write to them. But a few years ago the spamers got creative and aggressive with off shore sites that were set up for the purpose of spam. The return address are forged to start with, and if you manage to find the server and the email has not been shut down with in hours of the spam, they really don't care. And at some point the quantity just becomes overwhelming. My server started using Postin to filter and scan all mail and catch infected mail as well as quite a varity of spam.
I also created several e mail address to use on different sites to determine where the spamer were getting my address. I get spam on all of them but much more on my original address. Seem the spamers use a robot program that searches the net and harvest addresses. Some sell these and guarantee them to be good address. After all is it real easy to find which is good and which is not my sending a blank e mail to all the address. The ones that are not returned are good.
On several of the special interest boards I use, there is no pass word, and we freely post our address. I use one designed for that site. If you do not post your address you are making it harder for others to contact you severely limiting the usefulness of the board. If you add no spam or the like in the middle of the address, many novice computer users can not figure out how to use it.
I have had my original address for 10 years, and hate to give it up, but eventually I will probably have to.
If there is any way to permanently stop unwanted e mail I am not aware of it.
Free e-mail has become a victim of its own technological success.

Jax

200 a day PF! I thought I was badly off. The trouble is that wanted e-mails can get lost in amongst alot of junk. I'm pretty sure this happened to me only recently.

Well, I just got back from a day out and guess what ...no SPAM!

Will I miss invitations to sites of a dubiuos nature, offers to improve my 'physique', girls saying they would love to meet me and the offers of money to pay for it all? NOT ONE BIT! My inbox may look as if no one loves me anymore but I just don't care.

I really didn't want to change my e-mail address (and ISP user ID). Like Jax's it has been around for a while and I was kind of attached to it. Everybody knew what it was. However, I felt that having tried many SPAM control methods, this was the best option. I hope the change will have been worth it in the long run.

Something like Yahoo, or other web mail service, that uses SPAM filters would have been alternative but I thought that if I was going to change my e-mail address at all I might as well change my ISP primary POP account. Then the SPAM stops dead.