For about two years, I've been signing up for things to get greenpoints, mypoints, etc. I tried to be careful, but some amount of spam resulted. In the last three weeks, however, it has more than tripled. I tried to unsubscribe to the ones that repeated, but that just seemed to make the problem worse.
I now get about 60 per day, and need to do something. Changing my email account will be a real hassle, because there are lots of people who have the address. Anyone with a similar problem have any ideas?

The only way to really deal with this is to stop it at the beginning. Almsot everyone I know has a "spam" account at yahoo and hotmail.com. One is for your kind of spam. The other is given to shopping sites for receipts (and the subsequent SPAM that follows). Little you can do once your screwed like this. It's less effort to change the account than to get rid of the SPAM.

Responding only validates that there's a person behind the address; then your name & address are placed on the "Verified Addresses for sale!" lists.

I'm lucky in that I manage my own domain (www.infinethosting.com will give you one for about $10/month). I route all my "real" mail (i.e. corporate stuff and friends & family) through my real address there, and when I need to sign up for something on the web, I create an alias there that just goes to my account. For example, when I registered for the NWA E-mail promo bonuses (10k miles if you let 'em spam you, or something), I just created 'nwamail@<domain>.com'. Now that's just an alias for 'my_real_id@<domain>.com' but I have filters that trap stuff sent to nwamail and throw it in a 'junk' folder. When I have some spare time, I browse the subject headers in that folder, and typically just delete everything en masse.

It's not a perfect solution, but it's a lot better than getting interrupted with the spam every day -- at least this way, once a month or so I can visually scan a couple hundred subjects, and delete them all in a couple minutes.

"Almsot everyone I know has a "spam" account at yahoo and hotmail.com. One is for your kind of spam." I do this too, but mypoints, for example, claims that you have to use the same email address to get the points. And I don't want the mypoints offers going to the spam address.

Hasn't anyone else had to deal with this problem?

Have you thought of setting up some filters where your friends' and relatives' emails will go to a special folder?