GMail does a good job trapping spam, but as you say, somehow spam finds that account. I didn’t give it to services before 2006, but I still got spam. It’s just nicely hidden away in the spam folder.

Yahoo got better, but has backslid recently. No idea why. It’s impossible to compare to my work account b/c the policies are different, i.e. the trapped emails rarely make it to me for review.

@ChrisRowell: I can’t speak for my dad, but my mom is pretty suspicious of anything she gets that doesn’t have a name she knows attached to it. She even catches stuff that purports to be from herself. Phishing and spam are both lost on the two of us. My dad has a spam filter in Outlook, but I don’t know if he ever reads the messages or if any make it to his Inbox. (The rest of us use webmail services; he’s the holdout for desktop applications.)

And as for spam, my Hotmail account was set up as my spam account (you know, I have to give an email address on a website but I really don’t want to kind of thing). Recently, the amount of spam I receive went from something like 30 spams a day to 0.5. Not sure what happened, but that was a huge improvement. Now only my Yahoo! account gives me major spam.

The other thing I haven’t figured out is how do I get spam IMs? (only happens on my Yahoo)

@Carl: That’s the one I’ve seen. I like the pictures they get spammers to take, esp. the one with the loaf of bread on his head.

http://www.419eater.com/

Just in response to your last point about webmail not catching spam, Gmail does a great job and has let through about two spam messages over the entire duration of my use, which is about two years. So it’s not a “free service” problem, it’s a “lazy free service” problem. Read: Microsoft Hotmail.