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I have to agree. I've been using OS X Mail's spam filter since Jaguar was released. It gets those dang spams out of my way. It doesn't hurt the spammers, but it keeps them from annoying me.

Another thing to do to avoid spam: DO NOT READ HTML FORMATTED EMAIL. The formatting is embedded in the mail, but the images are generally on a separate server. By simply reading the mail, your computer has to fetch the images, thus letting the spammers know that you are a live email address, causing them to spam you more (sadly, this is what most unsubscribe links do also). Any decent email program can be set to not render the images.

Combine that with the fact that you can embed a virus in html email which would be launched by simply reading it, without even opening an attachment, and that leads you to one conclusion:

A smart person avoids HTML formatted email.

.. DO NOT READ HTML FORMATTED EMAIL. The formatting is embedded in the mail, but the images are generally on a separate server. By simply reading the mail, your computer has to fetch the images, thus letting the spammers know that you are a live email address..

They mainly do this to reduce the size of the e-mail; it's generally impossible to resolve an IP addy in a web server log to an e-mail addy, however if they're using anonymous FTP to retrieve the images, they could learn your addy that way... therefore, DO NOT enter your real e-mail addy into your web browser for anonymous FTP.