Here's a bit more elucidation about 'short stroking' a hard drive:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/255224/how_to_partition_your_hard_drive_to_optimize_performance.html

I do appreciate everyone's helpful advice to start using virtual email addresses.
I already do that with my active email address, which is shielded behind SneakEmail and SurfSolo and works through SeaMonkey Portable.

The problematic email address is the unencrypted 'standard issue' one my ISP provides, which I set up to work with Thunderbird, and which is just for a few contacts that don't really generate a lot of emails--until recent spam problems.
I've successfully defended that email address from spammers for the last 10 or 15 years, using KnujOn, among other things.
Then an important service needed an email contact for me over the telephone, and I gave my ISP email address out as a convenience since I wasn't near my computer, and next thing I know it's getting all this spam.
MailWasher is settling down somewhat now, but when it bounces spam, that prevents me reporting it to KnujOn, so I don't know if I'll stick with MailWasher, or quit that and just start reporting all the spammers to KnujOn.
Maybe I can figure out how to report it to KnujOn first, and then bounce it anyway using MailWasher.

KnujOn is NoJunk spelled backwards, and they have a delay factor between reporting spam and them shutting it down by tracking down the sources and reporting them to law enforcement authorities.
But with patience over the built-in delay in their response time, they've been surprisingly effective over the years.

I think what has happened is that in the last 2 years, more than the usual amount of people have started using the internet and phones and stuff.  These were the holdovers, the technophobes, and now they are playing with their phones more.  They are not used to the protection measures longtime users of computers are familiar with...antispam, firewalls, privacy, etc.

-superboyac (July 30, 2014, 01:34 PM)

Heh! I never owned a cell phone, but never thought of myself by that terminology; 'technophobe'.  ;D
I grew up when Operators gave you numbers free of charge, and you only paid for your own outgoing phone calls, not incoming calls (which you have no control over).
That to me was the greatest scam of all; getting people to pay for callers' incoming calls to you.
Then I watched one day as a friend stared at his printer blowing expensive ink and paper on an unwanted and unsolicited incoming spam message printed out on his printer, and felt as if some kind of penultimate milestone of spam idiocy had been reached.
That's what made Robert A. Heinlein the s-f writer so great; in 'Podkayne of Mars' during a taxi ride a 3-D spam vid advertisement popped up in the faces of the passengers, and when they paid extra then the driver was able to make the sound go away but not the video; Heinlein had it wired way before the first home pc was even on the horizon.

MailWasher is great, but I just need a way to get it to stop self-starting.