How I got rid of junk mail

    I am a freak when it comes to organizing things.  Especially on my computer, I like to keep all of my data properly labeled and organized in a hierarchal structure so that I can quickly view files without wasting time searching or weeding through garbage.
    My whole file system has been in a beautifully organized state for years, but one area that has continued to arrive short in my organization standards is my email inbox.  Running more than 5 domains with 10+ addresses has allowed junk mail to seep in uncontrolled, making my inbox a disaster zone that would waste too much of my time each day to manage.  If I didn't check  my mail at least once per day then I would be greeted the next day with a minimum of a few hundred emails.  However the sad truth is that only a few of these emails were important to me while the others just tried to sell me pharmaceuticals and Rolex watches.
    After trying for years to find an solution to my untamed inbox, I have finally discovered how to effectively get rid of the SPAM, leaving only the messages that are relevant to me.  Here's an explanation of how I did it.

1. SPAM filters
    My first task to make my inbox manageable again was to get rid of the junk mail that was coming to emails that I knew I couldn't just change.  My mail server enables junk mail filtering, so I easily switched that option on.  With that one action I cut my junk email intake by half.
    Half was not good enough for me though.  I also turned on an option within Thunderbird (my client of choice) to "Trust junk mail headers set by:" to either SpamPal or SpamAssassin.  This can be found under Tools>Accounts>Your account name> Junk Settings.  This further reduced the amount of junk I would receive, but I would estimate about 30% was still coming through.
    My final step in the filter phase of my SPAM elimination came from setting up custom message filters (Tools>Message Filters).  Basically I created filters that watched the subjects and "From:" fields of incoming messages for key words like "viagra", "rolex", "pharmaceuticals", and their variants.  If a message contains any of these terms than it is directed out of my inbox and to my junk folder.

2. Bayesian/Adaptive Filtering
    I had always had this feature on in Thunderbird, but thought it was generally ineffective.  It would read the email contents and make a decision as to whether it thought the message was junk or not, usually marking only the most obvious of messages as junk.  Later while researching the topic further I found out what would make this feature  work extraordinarily better.  Under Tools>Options>Advanced>Config Editor>"mail.adaptivefilters.junk_threshold" I changed the value from 70 to 30.  This instantly made the adaptive filtering much stronger and got rid of many unsolicited emails.

3. Catch-All Accounts
    Once I had neutralized the amount of email that I was receiving on my current accounts, I moved on to creating new a method of finding out where SPAM was coming from.  I created a catch-all address on one of my domains to use to sign up for all new websites.  For example if I want to sign up for an online photo service I would use NameOfPhotoService@berts-catchall-address.com.  I only use that email for that one particular service, so if I start receiving junk mail from NameOfPhotoService@berts-catchall-address.com, I easily can identify what site is the culprit of my junk mail and can complain/delete the address/enable more restrictive filtering so that any junk can be easily eliminated.

4. Unsubscribing from Newsletters
    This may sound easy and stupid, but it works.  I came to realize that a lot of the messages that I labeled as junk turned out to be valid newsletters subscriptions.  I realized that I would often sign up for a newsletter that I would later stop enjoying, only letting my subscription continue to deliver new issues to my inbox every week.  The solution? Unsubscribe from the newsletters that no longer appeal to me.

5. Create a White List
    At first, one of my friends' emails or a newsletter that I enjoy would occasionally get caught by my junk mail filters.  This just meant that for the first week or so I would have to check my junk mail folder to see if something was incorrectly labeled as junk.  If I did find something that was not junk, I would add the sender to a special "not junk" address book that I created so they would not get marked again in the future.

    Overall I have been using this system for a few weeks now and it is working magnificently.  I only receive about one junk email in my inbox per day now, which is a gigantic improvement over the few hundred I was receiving before.  Overall I am very satisfied with my current system and hope that you can adapt it to your needs to help slay the evil that is junk email.