Spamato and Thunderbird

For the last 10 years or so I've had to change my email address every 2-3 years because the spam became unmanageable. I tried using disposable email for each place I put my email but it's a huge pain in the butt to have to create an alias and set it up each time a site wants an email address.

So I started using collective disposable emails. I would use the same address for a bunch of places and then change it when the spam got too bad. I kept my personal addresses separate. The problem is that there are a few emails I actually want to see in the thousands of spams and unless I go to every single site and update my reg info I won't get those if I just toss the whole address.

Recently, overwhelmed by unmanageable spam and frustrated with deleting mail constantly from my Treo I downloaded and installed Spamato for Thunderbird. It works pretty well, and is highly customizable, but it is missing a few features that would make it really top-notch.

I have it set to need 3 spam rule matches to mark a message as spam. The highest number of matches I've ever seen has been 5 out of 8. Some of my valid messages come in as 3s or 4s though. I don't know if Spamato checks my address book but if it doesn't, that would be a really neat feature. Any email from anyone in my address book is automatically OK.

The other problem is that once I sort through the incoming mail and make sure it is all junk I still need to delete it from the server manually. This is more a Thunderbird issue, but I would like to ability to delete mail from the Trash and the server or just from the Trash. Everything I confirm as Junk is deleted from the server, and everything else that is deleted and is not junk stays on the server.

The last thing that would be nice is a better way to sort messages in the logs. It is in the Spamato logs that you can mark ham as spam or vice versa. Currently I have to search through the log, so adding filter options to filter by date, subject, sender, etc. would make my life a lot easier.

If anyone knows of any better spam filters let me know. I don't want to have to continue to change my email address every few years however, even with Spamato, I still have to delete email from my Treo if I want to get the valid emails when I am not in the office.

I also get a ton of IM spam but one thing at a time...