My first Ask HN! I've had this issue forever and I'm hoping someone here will have a brilliant solution. I created my Gmail account the day Gmail went into public beta, and I was never able to use it once. It's a short name; spam bots started submitting it into every signup form around, so I got/get about 100 "legitimate" emails a day (not including spam which is mostly caught by Gmail.) How can I get myself off the 50,000 or so mailing lists I'm on and make my address usable again? I'd like to bounce all messages for six months, then set up a whitelist afterward. Don't think I can bounce on Gmail, though. Other thoughts?
I have a 6-char Gmail account that's also an English dictionary word, which was made the day Gmail launched as invite-only. It gets a TON of spam, but I never notice it. The spam filter is well-trained. If you don't use any of the mailing lists you're on, one thing you can do is filter by the word "unsubscribe" or the phrase "remove yourself" :)
Honestly, don't over think it. Just start marking every single email you know is spam as spam. Occasionally check the spam box and un-spam anything legit. The filters on gmail are really, really good and they learn quickly what to filter and what not. Don't do anything weird or complicated, just hit the spam button.
Try activating the IMAP/POP settings on gmail, then suck in your gmail emails into a desktop client that supports bouncing to spam accounts, c.f. <a href="http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/10/23/bounce-email-spam-messages-back-to-spammers-with-non-delivery-notifications/" rel="nofollow">http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/10/23/bounce-email-...</a>
I don't think you can do much except use filters + aggressive labelling as spam for a while. Hopefully after a while when you've got down the filters to an art form, unwanted things should stop hitting your inbox.