My home email address gets a huge amount of spam, as does my Gmail. The great thing about Gmail is that all of its spam filtering is set up already. I don’t have to mess around and configure all sorts of folders and filters, tag all of my mail so that Thunderbird know that it’s spam etc.

Instead of filtering it with email headers, I just forward all mail sent to joe@kapiti.net.nz to my Gmail account, which has a filter that returns it to [secret-nonsense-phrase]@kapiti.net.nz and set thunderbird accordingly.

One disadvantage of this method is that mail sent directly to [secret-nonsense-phrase]@kapiti.net.nz would get through without being filtered. This is only a ’security through obscurity’ type of thing, which is in general a bad idea.