The Best way to protect your inbox from spam

and we are not talking about tool, software...

[zeus]

I now had a site for 4 years, which was the first site where I also wanted to do something against spam email, simply not getting any was the goal, not filtering or protection against spam with a software.

Now I think all in all I have only recieved, hmm 20 spam emails in 4 years and thats maybe to high a count, because Im not even sure if ever had got any.

What I did is, registred the domain name with privacy, so no one could se who owns the domain and never had the email writen (HTML) on the site, then you can have a email account like in the early years, witout spam.

[physics]

That's a good idea and also a good case for a very legitimate use of domain privacy.
I have some email addresses that I think are on every spam list on the world because they've been posted on web sites for years ;)

[lammert]

I recently bought a few dozen domainnames that were never used before. I have parked them on my own server with a dumb page only saying that the site is not available. Yet for all these domains I receive almost daily spam emails trying a series of default email addresses like postmaster, webmaster, sales, info etc. The only email address they didn't try was abuse :) So at the moment not posting your email addresses anywhere is not a 100% guarantee you'll never receive spam.

Ironically, the email address I use in many of my public registrations never receives any spam email. It seems that who-is scrapers haven't found this address yet.

[zeus]

the biggest protection is to get a privacy listed domain, then you almost get non spam emails, as said I maybe got 20 in 3-4 years.

[lammert]

The random-address spam I mentioned is only comming in on newly registered domains I have. It seems that spammers try newly registered domains to see if they have a catch-all address installed. I have other domains for a much longer time that never get any spam message, even with public registration.

The only domains where I receive a lot of spam are those where I have an email addres published on one or more public pages. I am currently changing some of these to on-line contact forms and that has effect, but the spammers will try the old addresses for a while until they see that email to those addresses is rejected every time.

[Dijkgraaf]

Even if you don't publish your e-mail address on a web page, it can get harvested from peoples address books and received/sent mail when they get infected by a virus.