Various companies have come up with schemes to filter out the spam before you even see it, with varying degrees of success. Unfortunately, the spammers always seem to be one step ahead of the anti-spammers, whether with blacklists, whitelists, Bayesian filters, requests for confirmation and so on. The surest way of not being bothered with spam is either not having an email address or, if you do, never looking at your inbox. That doesn't stop snail-mail spam or, worse, phone/SMS/MMS spam, but one cannot live entirely in a cocoon. The author only has to worry about the tinned version of 'spam' after discovering a miracle email protection filter.