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1. Never respond to SPAM, just delete it.  This includes contest and other sweepstake offers.

2. Do not assume the person who spammed you will remove you from their list if you asked.  Even if they do remove you from their list they may sell your e-mail address, that you have now validated, to all of their friends who will send you more spam.

3. Never post your personal E-mail address to a web page, newsgroup, forum, or any other location that it may be found on the Internet.  Where possible avoid using your e-mail address as your username for service like E-Bay.  Spammers build their lists of e-mail address by harvesting addresses posted through out the Internet. 

4. If you need to post an address on the open Internet consider creating a secondary account.  You can setup an second Midmich.net account and use webmail to view the account's e-mail, or you can get free e-mail addresses from gmail, yahoo, or hotmail.  If an account becomes over run with SPAM cancel it.  This way your personal account remains clear of junk.

5. NEVER buy anything from a company that spams. Don't visit their sites or ask for more information. (If you respond to their spams, you're encouraging them to continue spamming -- they only need a tiny fraction of responses to be profitable.)

There's another reason not to buy anything from a company that spams: over 95% of SPAM offers are scams! In fact, not responding to spam is the single most effective way to not get scammed on the Internet.

6. Use Midmich.net Mailguard to filtering your e-mail. Mailguard runs a series of tests on all incoming e-mails and scores the message if it is junk or not. 

If the message scores high enough to be considered SPAM the message is held in a quarantine area.  Messages held in quarantine are available to be reviewed for 7 days before we remove them.  If a message is mistakenly quarantined you may rescue the message.  Rescued messages are forwarded to your e-mail account.           

It may take a short time to figure out how to do this, but it's definitely worthwhile.  Mailguard places you in control of your e-mail.  You can set your score levels, view good and bad e-mails, even block or always allow certain addresses.

While these tips may not actually stop spam, they will certainly help you drastically reduce the amount of spam you get.