I double check my spam filters ...

And it's pretty good at handling spam.

Add to it a strict filter on my mail server that bounces known spam sources.

I get so little spam anyway (which really surprises me, there must be filters out there that I don't know about).

I have two very old Yahoo email address that I just check sometimes. These get the most spam, about three or four messages a month each. I suspect that Yahoo must be filtering and deleting before I even see the email. Suspected spam then turns up on my computer and gets filtered by my local spam filter. It works 90% of the time.
My main personal address just doesn't get spam. I suspect that is because I have never put it online in plain text form.
I also have a domain with a wild card for email. I sometimes get spam at that domain, but rarely.
I also use Mailinator for anything even slightly sketchy, so I guess lots of spam meant for me is going there.

I check my spam folder every time I get emails in it, but this happens roughly once a week or less.

I know, intellectually, that spam is a huge problem, but I just don't seem to personally have a problem.

I run my own mail server and I try to keep SpamAssassin relatively up-to-date.

Did have a period when I didn't update it for six months or so though and didn't really detect any more spam than usual slipping through (and no legitimate mail being marked as spam either).

It is unfortunate, but some of my family members emails end up caught by spam filters, probably because they aren't careful with their pc's and have been used as SPAM bots.

My personal spam filtering is through gmail's filtering, and pretty much the only time I check the spam folder is when I don't get an email I'm expecting. The last couple of times I've checked, I have seen some legitimate email in there, but it's all automated daily emails from companies I have accounts with and the like - it's still never actually caught anything important to me.

In my former job, however, one of my responsibilities was running the spam filtering system where I worked. It was a state agency with around four thousand people, so we had a mailbox for people to forward spam they received to, and our users were supposed to report blocked email that shouldn't have been blocked to the help desk. False positives that were reported via the help desk, I checked out as soon as I got the ticket, forwarding the email on and then examining why it was blocked and tuning the filters if necessary.

The false negative reports I usually checked once or twice a day during the work week, but sometimes less often if other, higher priority tasks were pressing. At the height of things, a few years ago, our incoming email volume was around 2 million messages a day, more than 99% of which the system classified as spam and blocked. Even with that, we received dozens to low hundreds of reports of spam that made it through a day. A lot of those were duplicates (same message received by multiple people), and some were user false positives (sorry, the mailing list you signed up for isn't spam - if you don't want to get mail from it any more, unsubscribe), but still, there were a dozen or two individual new things to block every day. False positives from our system were much rarer, at least going by reports - I'd say we averaged about two or three a month.

I look at the current barracuda log and constantly tweak.

And I trawl it for phishing sites to get my Free Netcraft Mug for phishing reports!!!!

Like I never got the e-mails or something that I was supposed to get. It happens rarely though!

Been working well for a decade. The neat thing is that 90% of the stuff that needs to be rejected can be done without any spam analysis at all. I only call my spamassassin checks *AFTER* vetting things through MimeDefang. Why waste the CPU cycles? RBLs, Pretending to be from my domain, mail to system accounts, invalid HELO (not FQDN or IP address - single words are very popular with spammers/botnets), RFC1918 HELO addresses, etc. After that, they then go through my spamassassin process, which has been collecting bayes data for several years. The community provided spamassassin rules are kept up to date, and I have a Nagios process that also ensures they are up to date (check_sa-update on nagios exchange. Written by yours truly).

I'd put my system, based on MimeDefang, Spamassassin, clam, etc against barracuda any day. I bet I have a lot less false positives (0 the past year, 1 every couple of months while tuning at my last company), and use a whole lot less CPU by discarding obvious garbage that doesn't need to be processed by spamassassin.

The most recent thing is the "Hello" stuff from legitimate mail accounts. The spammers are using active exploits the past few years to slip through filters, but they still don't get in. I should relabel my spam folder to "Friends with compromised accounts" Everything else scores off the charts and is discarded.

I never liked the idea of the Bayesian spam filtering that is most popular with big e-mail providers. I figure, as a software engineer, I have e-mail conversations about spam that might be caught by the filters. And in the meantime, the spammers are including paragraphs of text out of The Hobbit in their messages. Yeah, I know the spam filtering tech has gotten a lot more accurate over the years. But...

Years ago, I decided to do it myself. I set up my own e-mail server and built custom filters. I look for connections that violate SMTP protocols. I look for connections that don't have host names. I look for messages with forged headers or that violate SPF or that come from domains known to use Domain Keys, but don't have one.

I use white lists and black lists and thresholds for things that aren't automatically spam, but if there are enough of them, then it gets flagged.

Sure, I'm doing a lot more work than you are, but I successfully block thousands of spam messages each day, and only very rarely have one sneak through (and then I figure out how it got through, and update my system), and also fairly rarely I'll block a legitimate message (and most of the time that's because of a mail server configuration issue on their end).

Sometimes, it's good to be a geek.

I have an email forwarding alias and an email service, both provide spam filtering, and I don't think I'm missing anything important. If a questionable message is caught by the alias provider, the sender gets a reply asking them to prove their humanity -- this is the provider's feature, not my idea, BTW.

My wife, on the other hand, still uses hotmail, and she gets a lot of false positives so she has to check her "spam folder" frequently. Maybe she's misconfigured something on her end. I don't know, and it's not my problem unless she asks me, which she hasn't.

What I do do myself is put a few simple email rules on my personal computer, not for real spam, just "virtual" spam. Anything marked "high priority" goes into a special folder labeled "deal with it later". Seriously, it's only high priority if it's a high priority for me, not the sender. Secondly, I take anything with a blank subject or a subject containing redundant information and put those in the "annoying" folder. This means emails with words in the subject line like, "subject," "message," "email," "note," "letter," "from," etc. My assumption here is that the sender probably also fills the email with a lot of useless junk, so I postpone dealing with it as long as possible.

I have spam filters, but they're set not to delete spam mail I receive; rather, they just tag it as spam in the subject line and let me choose whether or not to read the mail. So I guess I check the caught spam every time I check my email.

On the other hand, I don' t think I ever check for messages deleted by my Usenet killfile. Spam is one thing, but trolls are another.

Every sender gets a unique email address, and whenever spam might come through, all I need to do is disable that single address. Haven't needed to do this for months :: Haven't gotten any spam in months..

I put everything that isn't whitelisted by being from people in my address book in a folder labeled "spam".
If something shows up in there I usually notice it right away and either delete it or add the sender to my address book.
Some especially persistent senders get extra special treatment by being added to a "mark as read and delete" filter.

Our spam filter sends out a daily summary of the quarantine, which I skim for false positives (rare, but they do happen). Unfortunately, we're moving to google, and I do have to check it daily, as it frequently has false positives and it doesn't seem to learn...

The current result (7%) is higher than noise or pranks would indicate, so there are a lot of you out there apparently using no spam filter. How do you do that? Between my two primary email addresses I get 1 spam email every 5 minutes, which outweighs valid email 10:1. (These email addresses are reasonably closely guarded, but have existed for a total of 27 years, so they're out there somewhere.) My life's too short to spend that much time shoveling shit.

So how do you do it? Do you simply not use email? Is your email address brand new? Do you only use burner accounts? Do you get a thrill from reading or deleting trolling spam? Do you simply not know you have a spam filter?

Beautiful spam! ....

But I don't like spam...

May as well not use any filters then.

On my own domain, I have SpamAssassin configured well enough that I simply have it delete anything flagged as spam. Either it's in my inbox, or it's gone. I do tend to err on the safe side as far as what it tags though. In all the years I've been doing this, I've had one complaint from a family member about a possible missed confirmation message from an online signup. However, I submitted one myself, and the mail was received right away, so I think it was just a fluke that the email didn't get delivered, as opposed to my filter erroneously eating it. A few times I've actually increased the spam threshold, just to allow more borderline spams through so I could learn/report them.

I have a couple GMail accounts, one of which is based on my name and was created solely for testing external mail flow at work. However, there are no less than 5 other people who seem to think it's their address, and these people seem to be the type to enter their email address anywhere they can. I get tons of spam at this address, despite never actually using it publicly. I mainly got the other one just to reserve the name, rather than for actual usage. I get a few spams to it, but nothing major. GMail's filtering does a pretty good job, with only a few getting missed (and no false positives, since I don't actually use them for real email). I do check the caught spams and report them though, just because I'm an angsty geek.

I am happy just to delete it all :-)

Please tell us of the mysterious thing you call 'spam'.
Where can one get this 'spam'?
Is there a place for FREE 'spam'?

It's delicious, especially with either scrambled eggs for breakfast... or as one of the meats served in Chinese hot-pot.

I check when I don't get an expected email to see if one of my filters has stopped an email, I might have forgotten to whitelist a new address.

I look into /dev/null but can see nothing there, so all's well ;)

Whenever I'm expecting an email, but haven't received it.

Whenever I'm preparing my next spam campaign. I mean...duh! You've got to check all 500+ of them to make sure you're getting inbox delivery. *ducks*

We use the Cisco Ironport - and have done since before Cisco bought them. Quite good devices - but as posted by someone above - 90% of the work is done by reputation filtering and protocol correctness filtering - which can be done using the normal black holes with relatively no cost. If the spam makes it through both of these, then its probably got a 5% chance of making it through the content filtering. I probably get a couple of false negatives a day - and 0 false positives in the last 3 years..

I don't let email pass through my spam folder without eyeballing. Actual spam gets mark read, non-spam gets unjunked. Usually I get between 2000-3000 spam mails per month, 500-600 actual emails (including mailing lists and crud), perhaps 10 false negatives and 5 false positives. That's a pretty good ratio, but the five might be important so I still have to scan through the 3000. It's less work than it sounds like, particularly since it's enough to do it about every two weeks.