After a few years online and having subscribed to many lists and published your email in a variety of places, your email can spin out of control.
One of the saviors for me was switching to GMAIL for my primary email account. This seems to work well for spam filtering where the spam emails are flagged by users so they get filtered by a voting system.
I used to use Yahoo! but that was blocking emails that I wanted to receive and now it is forwarding me emails that contain viruses that GMAIL refuses to download (rightly so).
So I find that I can handle large amounts of incoming email with GMAIL where it was over-whelming before.
Next I have a tip for how to safely subscribe to lists.
Say I want to subscribe to the list of a marketer whose domain name is marketingmonster.com What I do is set up an email forwarder in my webhosting Cpanel that is of the form marketingmonster.com@mydomain.com and forward it to my primary email.
Now I can tell if they are the source of any spam since the receiving email is tagged with their domain name.
Also, since it is a unique forwarding email, I have no fear of it being added to an unwanted list since I can easily delete it.
If I get too much email from this list, but I still want to receive it to check out later, I can also change the redirection to a POP3 mail box on my server.
So I hope this gives you some ideas for how to efficiently handle incoming email.
If you have any questions on how to do any of this, feel free to post a comment …