...so very soon (hopefully) I'll have a new laptop to replace my decrepit old broken one. But I'm thinking of closing my current email account, which I've had since I was 14, and starting a new one simply because of the amount spam and scam emails I'm getting. For over a year I got emails from poetry.com urging me to pay for this or that to commemorate reaching the finals of their contest and to go to this year's convention to win!

Then I started to get emails from a psychic website (or so I assume) offering to help me become a lucky person/millionaire/work success etc. Not to mention the number of emails offering me loans, credit cards or to wipe out all of my debts (I was 17!) ANd then of course the very poorly spelt Nigerian scams.

But lately it's been getting worse. I've been getting emails from a "Chinese electronics company". Add to that the ones that were obviously phishing - eBay, PayPal, HSBC and many other websites, banks and companies which I've never used before. It's pissing me off but at the same time I wonder just how long it would be until that inbox became cluttered with the same crap. How do you escape these things?

Gmail. That's how.

They have and use the best spam filters in existence. I am surprised when I see spam in my inbox it happens so rarely.

I find that weird, one of my e-mail adresses is constantly full of spam, but my other one gets absolutely none. I can't work out why really.

I got about 6 email accounts, I tend to use certain sites I don't trust yet as the ones that I start off using the emails I use the least, if I get a lot of junk emails, I tend not to change the email registered to that email....if not, I change it to my main accounts

Well I have 2 hotmail accounts and the second one's nearly always empty cos I only ever use it for job applications

I use hotmail.com and I rarely get junk mail. When I used Yahoo, the spam came pouring in! It's aggravating so I never check my mail there.

I got screwed once by someone offering me a credit card. I'm so naive. The people kept drafting my bank account and it took me forever to get it stopped. Till then, I had to pay each charge. Never again!

I've seen that email from Nigeria. I'm afraid to open anything unfamiliar these days.

One time, someone on my yahoo messenger supposedly sent me a link to her pictures. I clicked on it and it was a virus. She said she never sent it. I don't know how that is done but I think someone took over her account. Others have told me the same thing has happened to them.

I got an email supposedly from yahoo, but I don't remember the subject. I opened it and ended up with 300 porn files with viruses in them. It was very embarrassing to take my computer to a man who knows my family in order to clean up my hard drive. After that, yahoo sent out a warning about the fake email.

Try hotmail and see if you have better luck unless that's what you're using now. Good luck!

My Hotmail account is about 50% spam, my Bt Yahoo one I don't think I've ever had a spam e-mail.

It wouldn't take very long for the mailbox to fill up with junk. those companies sell your email addy to one another, that's how you get spam from a site you don't visit.

I would suggest switching over to Gmail also.

God, just logged into my Gmail account for the first time in about two years, I have 1226 e-mails. I think almost all of them seem to be from Myspace.