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I liberally sprinkle my address everywhere (here it is again, spammers: avarab@gmail.com) and I don't have a spam problem. I get at most 2-4 messages per week that make it through GMail's spam filters.

Those are all glaringly obvious spam though, to the point that I've begun suspecting that they're just using me to confirm that suspected spam really is spam.

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I agree -- I rarely (few times per week) receive spam to my main inbox.

I used to obfuscate my email address, but realized it doesn't matter. Spammers will get at you no matter what (unused email addresses get spam), and obfuscation just annoys people who would like to contact you. I let GMail do its job.

I once ran a grep on my personal postfix mailserver's logs. Turns out I would constantly 550 bounce spam for email addresses that didn't exist for my domains. Thousands of connections a day, all looking for adam@, barry@, charles@... and down an alphabetical list.

That, on top of the relay requests, would fill up a single day's logfile 5 times faster than authorized traffic.

This is why I stopped using firstname@domain and started using firstname.surname@domain. Tends to stop the dictionary attacks from working.

I occasionally have ham messages caught in Gmail's spam filter. The fewer spam messages I receive, the fewer I have to skim through.

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