I once read about some document about MIT's email system. It says it helps the spam filter to better classify spam mails if we can save the spam mails from our INBOX to Spamscreen. It mentions something like a "training" mechanism: the anti-spam system will learn from the existing mails in our Spamscreen filters. Although I was not sure about how helpful it would be, I did try my best to save every unfiltered spam message into my Spamscreen folder. Anyway, there was not much spam to my address ... until recently.
In the past few months, unfortunately, things changed: I have been receiving much more junk mails than before. I know, though, that's mainly because I have subscribed to quite a few email lists since the end of May. As it takes (maybe just a little bit) more effort to save mails to Spamscreen than simply delete them, I started to ask myself: does it really help to save them to Spamscreen?
So I went to my Spamscreen folder to see what had been filtered. To my surprise, I noticed many spamming messages that used to pass through the filter were caught in the last seven days. (I don't have samples prior to last week as I set a rule to delete messages older than seven days in the Spamscreen.) This finding, by itself, is not conclusive, since MIT IS&T seems to have upgraded (or planning to do so?) their spam filtering system lately (I saw some news about spam filtering on The Tech last week, but have forgotten the details). Anyway, it is still a good sign.
Therefore, I think I am still going to save spam mails to the Spamscreen folder.