I use Gmail to aggregate all my mailboxes. Gmail's spam folder keeps things for 30 days before deleting them. I've currently got 2965 spam emails in the spam folder - which is a little on the low side of my average. So, I get about 3000 spam emails in 30 days, or about 100 per day.
Gmail's spam filtering is almost 100% effective, for me. I see maybe one, occasionally two, spam emails in my inbox per month, and have had maybe 3 false positives over the last couple of years. I very occasionally glance at the contents of the first page of the spam folder, just to be on the safe side, but like I said, I almost never find anything mis-filtered.
For me this is good enough - I'm effectively shielded from all spam and don't really notice it as an issue.
Exactly. I "outsourced" my spam management to GMail and I don't think I did ever try to obfuscate my email, they are all over the net :)
My position is that one has to deal with spam by means invisible to end users—and that rules out CAPTCHA and email obfuscating.
I used to quickly look through my spam folder in GMail and then flush it whenever it went above a certain amount of messages. Now I don't have that compulsion anymore, since there is an option to not display the unread count.
I just let the spam folder alone. If there is any false positive, and if it is important enough, the sender will most likely send another message and the probability of multiple false positives is lower.
