On my work accounts, we're using SpamAssassin. For personal mail, I've switched from Hotmail to gmail in part because Hotmail does a poor job of detecting spam.

Lately, I've been getting frustrated by the amount of spam that makes it past the spam detecting routines on the mail servers. I don't really want to do something involved on my own system. So what to do?

Junk Mail Controls gives instructions on how to adjust the spam filter in Thunderbird so it's more sensitive to spam. I'm hoping that this helps reduce spam while still avoiding false positives. I have to say that gmail and Thunderbird have been stellar on this, which is a good thing. I'd much rather get a few annoying spam messages than lose real mail into the spam hopper.

The other reason I switched is because of Microsoft's short-sighted policy of dropping accounts after 30 days without a login. It's bit me a few times but it keeps biting my mom who doesn't use email that often. I think Hotmail is more understandable to the average person than gmail. But at some point, the spam and the risk of losing your mail outweigh that, you know?