I think this subject was discussed before. I recall suggesting having a domain name, and varying the bit to the left of the "@" when too much spam starts to arrive.
Spam filters are OK and can be quite clever but you have to understand that you will lose some genuine mail too. This is absolutely impossible to avoid. It may not matter to individuals but it should matter to a business. These days, spam filters and spamcop-type blacklists (the latter often unwarranted, and resulting from a whole ISP being blacklisted for a few days) ensure that a load of genuine emails go missing, which is IMHO pretty stupid.
In my business, we had a website since about 1995. I made the mistake of having several email addresses on the website (the usual
[email protected],
[email protected], etc) in plain text, and I think it was these more than any other single factor that eventually (by 2004) resulted in 98% of our email being spam. Today it is about 99%.
Filtering systems like Mailwasher (loaded with about 50 filters) are fun to play with but when you get say 10 real emails and 1000 spams per day, you will lose at least a couple of the real ones, which is unacceptable. Mailwasher will delete 990 of the spams too but that's useless if you lose a few real emails. The only solution is to let Mailwasher identify the spam prior to deletion and check it all manually, but that can take ages. IMHO, in any scenario where Mailwasher's spam ID can be manually checked,one could have deleted the spam manually.
So I went for an authentication system, which returns an email to each new sender asking him to REPLY to it. A reply then places the sending address on a whitelist. Spammers never read anything that comes back and they don't do the reply. There are several commercial outfits offering this kind of thing, but ours is clever in that outgoing emails are parsed for the To: header and that goes into the whitelist too, so if we write to somebody first he doesn't encounter the antispam system.
The whitelist was preloaded with known customers and we also run a list of keywords which, if found anywhere in the email, cause it to bypass the antispam system.
Now, we have a working email system. We don't lose any emails (other than those from people too dumb to read the authentication request, and there are always a few of those). The server works hard for its living grinding 1000 emails a day through all these keyword matching algorithms and running a few GB of spam on a 2-week FIFO queue but, hey, that's what computers are for!
A private individual should register a domain name ... I wrote out detailed instructions on this a month or two ago.