Sadly, in this modern age when over 90% of e-mail is scam or spam, you need a mail filter. Sooner or later, any address you use will get into the spammers hands - often through your being in someone else's address book when their PC is compromised by a harvester bot virus (and so on, ad infinitum).
Most decent ISPs provide mail filtering of one sort or another, which will separate the junk into a folder where you can look at it via your web browser and decide what to zap (usually all of it). You can get similar services from Spamcop (excellent, but US$30 a year) or Gmail (free) - you arrange for your mail to forward to them, or set Spamcop to poll your POP server and collect the mail, filter it, and forward the genuine stuff to a different e-mail address.
Don't faff about with those spamcatchers that live on your PC - you have to download the stuff to check it, which defeats half the point.
And don't bother with the ones that write back to the sender asking him to fill in a form: many people don't bother, or the form gets trapped in their spam filter and never seen.