Just came back from a one week vacation to find out i have 30Mb of web spam to download. grrrr.

To quote Bill Clinton, "I feel your pain." I don't trust spam filters, so I don't use them. As a result, I've set up Outlook to just download the message headers, which allows me to quickly get rid of the obvious spam without having to download all those virus attachements.

yep, spamfilters (ie: popfile), are just that. they let you organize your mail (or spam) into categories, but you STILL have to download your e-mails... :(

I have been using SpamCop.net for awhile now, and it works pretty well. It will download the email from your pop3 accound and store it on their server. It is then filtered there. You then download you almost free spam email from their server using pop3.
Then you can from time to time go in and check the emails that was held back. This is done by a WEB page.
So the cool thing is that you download LESS emails but you are still in control of what emails are deleted. So nothing get deleted before you say DO IT.
-Sam

Pressure your ISPs so they run at least one spam filter on their servers, which cuts down on the amount of spam coming in to your inbox, and hence that you download : I get less than 50 a week, and of that less than 20 are not filtered by mail.app...
My ISP, magma.ca, a smaller Canuck ISP, runs both Brightmail and Spam Assassin on their servers, and they give me the possibility of tweaking (a little) the Assassin's parameters.

So start sending in mails to your ISPs, telling them that if they don't start acting, you will : you'll find another one :)

Turned Spam Assasin on my webhost emails. now only my ISP's email is filled with spam (they demand 3$ for spam removal!), so i think i wont use it anymore, or just hint them how easy it is to change ISP.