Unfortunately, what Keef describes as "rude"
is necessary for a business which gets perhaps 10k spams per day and doesn't want to lose emails from real people who have NOT previously been in contact.
We run such a "challenge" based system at work, but to get challenged your email passes through some tests first and these dump at least 98% of spam without a challenge.
The challenge system is needed if one is to run addresses like
[email protected] which will always get spammed, but they still have to work.
Spam FILTERING (keywords, IP etc) worked until about a year ago but not any more. Any attempt to use filters today will dump some real emails, especially those from people who are running their own SMTP servers (like me).
Many people don't care about losing emails, but I do.
We used to run Mailwasher but it doesn't work anymore. Somebody still had to read through the emails. In the end I had about 50 filters hooked up into it... all kinds of clever stuff like dumping emails which contained HTML font specifications in the Subject header
Until you get a real live customer who decides to underline something in his Subject......
I have already written copious amounts here on how to get email working and avoid spam, so here's just a summary:
Assuming Justiciar is unable to run his own email server, I would suggest the following:
Buy yourself a domain e.g. justiciar.co.uk - you can get this from any of many outfits. Personally I use
Virtualnames and they will do email and web redirection etc also. In fact I think they do complete email accounts now.
Then set up the control panel at VN to DUMP all emails sent to the justiciar.co.uk domain - EXCEPT those addressed to one real alias e.g.
[email protected]
This will get rid of virtually all spam, permanently.
The only spam that will get through will be
(a) Spammers whose name-dictionary attacks happened to stumble upon the alias (most unlikely if you use fred23 but more likely if you use say steve, or john.smith).
(b) Spam resulting from your friends' address books which have been ripped off by Outlook address book harvesting trojans - typically these will be the "less computer literate" friends of yours
This is getting less common, because the trojans in question are quite big executables and a lot of ISPs are checking for them.
But if you get too much spam, eventually, change to fred24 and tell your contacts...
Everybody should buy themselves a domain name. It's an "address for life", costs next to nothing, and you can then run a website (hosted by almost any ISP) on it i.e.
www.justiciar.co.uk
Hope this helps - J. email me if you need any help (we have been in contact).