Let me give you my experience with this...
Reporting to spam agencies won't work. The new computer viruses have built-in spamming engines. This is alarming to people who was hoping to have a permanent email address :-( ... What happens is that.
1. A friend of yours receives an infected message.
2. A friend of yours opens the infected attachment.
3. Virus runs,
secretly installing a spam-making engine!!!!!!!!
4. Virus randomly selects an email addresses from her addressbook
5. Virus masquerades as that stranger and SENDS YOU an email message with THAT stranger's email address.
6. You receive the email message from what seems to be a stranger.
7. Because the virus fakes the sender, you didn't know it was your friend who sent you the virus (unintentionally, of course)
Unfortunately, because of these damn viruses, it is extremely difficult to track down who sent you tha virus. It could be your friend who is infected but you don't know who, because the
VIRUS MASQUERADES AS SOMEBODY ELSE ... and as a result, you get a bunch of messages with attachments from a bunch of strangers.
I don't like these new computer viruses with built-in spamming technology. Moreover, these new spam-viruses change the content of the email messages so much that it's somewhat hard to use a spam filter to block these viruses.
If you're unlucky, your email address could get installed into several copies of these viruses running on 10 different strangers' computers (without them knowing), your email address is pretty much doomed to receive infected spam sent by these computer viruses. Until you can track down a friend of a friend of a friend of yours (and 10 of them!) to tell them to clean their systems, it's almost impossible to track and contact WHO is sending you these damned spam viruses! There's no single person to report to. And the true sender email address doesn't exist in these virus-generated spam messages!
The only fix: Change email address :-(
(If you are getting several per day, these messages will unfortunately persist for a very long time -- even 6 months later! You might get lucky and the virus-generated spam will stop, but if you are already getting several per day then you should start thinking hard about changing the email address. I still get virus-generated spam at some of my older email addresses even 6 months after the first virus-generated spam)
I am happy to report that once I changed my email address, and now using a few separate email addresses (one for work, one for friends, one for filling in web forms or even paper forms such as application forms) .... only one email address now receives spam. I give out work/personal addresses extremely carefully, even more carefully than I give out a cellphone number! I don't even give them to my banks or cable company either! Even when signing up for work contests I don't even use my work address -- but use my separate web-form email address instead. My work and personal address have been 100% spam free for over 6 months (not a single spam for 6 months!) because I am very careful at who I give these email addresses to. Only the web-form email address gets spam now.
Also, another spam-avoiding tip: Use a more obscure email address such as
Straw50berryMania@YourISP.com .... instead of
Strawberry@YourISP.com because the spammers now use dictionaries to send to
ALL_WORDS@YourISP.com randomly (dictionary words and common names before the @ sign).... so spammers can send you spam even though they don't even know your email address!
