Clicking the 'unsubscribe' link in spam emails is the WORST thing you can do! Spammers send out millions of emails without knowing whether the address really exists or, if it does, whether the owner of that address is actually using it. Clicking the 'unsubscribe' link simply tells a spammer that the address is valid, meaning that it will then receive lots more spam.
The best way to avoid spam is to ensure that you're not using email addresses which can easily be guessed at by a spammer's computer and to use 'disposable' addresses wherever possible.
For example, a computer can easily guess that addresses such as
[email protected],
[email protected], etc, will probably exist. If John Smith wants to make his address difficult to guess at, he should choose something like
[email protected]
Whenever you sign up for something on the internet (such as The Answerbank) or make an internet purchase (e.g. from Amazon) you should create a new email account solely for use with that service. There are hundreds of free web-based email providers, but a few, such as Gmail and Gawab, will let you create accounts which can also be accessed via an email client (such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail or Thunderbird). See the 3rd paragraph onwards, of my first post here, for details of creating a Gawab account:
http://www.theanswerb...9.html#answer-1855501
If you're using web-based access to read your mail, there's not much else that you can do to avoid spam. However if you're using an email client (Outlook Express, etc) you can use a free programme called Mailwasher, which can identify spam on your mail provider's server and delete it before it's downloaded to your computer:
http://www.mailwasher.net/
Chris