SPAM email. Everyone hates it. Company and individuals alike have built various systems for dealing with it, but from what I hear, most solutions are sub-optimal.
I currently receive about 365 spam emails per day. 290 in my personal account, and 75 in my work account.
But I hardly ever have to think about this!
That’s because I use hosted Gmail for both my personal and work accounts. Every time a spam email makes it through. I simply check it, and hit the “Report Spam” button. Hundreds of thousands of others do this every day. Then, the Google algorithm goes through and figures out which emails are spam based on this aggregate result.
It ends up being extremely accurate. I’ve only had 2 or 3 false positives* over the past 3 years I’ve used Gmail.
Because of this, I can confidently ignore the spam/junk folder. Gmail saves these messages for 30 days – just in case.
Yet another reason to use hosted Google services… :)
*A false positive is a legitimate email that gets marked as spam.