Assuming such a thing is possible.
I’m 99% sure I know the original source of the spam I get in two different email addresses. I use Thunderbird to retrieve my mail, but lately I’ve been going to my email provider (Comcast) and use their “Report as spam” button on the junk and then using Thunderbird to get the regular mail.
How long do spammers continue to hit your email before they delete it from their lists when they realize they aren’t getting any response?
Forever. The lists of addresses get reused by other spammers. Every so often my Hotmail account (only used for mailing lists & stuff anyway) gets inundated, with CC addresses which are the same each time, clearly from an alphabetical list of addresses that’s reused by different spammers.
Like he said, forever. It’s not worth their time to even analyze which e-mail addresses are responding, much less go to the trouble to delete any off the list. Their whole philosophy is to send to as many recipients as possible, the idea being that the more you send it to, the more responses you get. They don’t care about the 99.99% of recipients who don’t respond. They just figure the simplest way to get more responses (out of the .01% responding) is to raise the number it’s sent to in the first place.
In other words, they’re not going to waste their time making their lists more efficient, because in the big picture that costs more time and trouble then the way they do it. The way they do it wastes a lot of other folks’ time (e.g., yours, mine, etc.), but what do they care?
Forever, eh?
That’s a might bit longer than I had hoped. 
Let’s put it this way. My father died 10 years ago. I’m still getting junk mail addressed for him. Real mail, that costs money to produce and send.
For 10 years he (obviously) hasn’t bought from or contributed to these organizations. For 10 years I’ve been using their postage-paid envelopes to send them notes that he’s deceased.
Still the mail comes.
If they can’t be bothered to clean up their mailing lists, why should a spammer clean up an e-mail list.
My wife still gets mail for her grandfather (the house we live in was his) and he died about 20 years ago.
Well, somebody posted a thread in the BBQ Pit in which a spammer was successfully sued by a spam recipient.
Maybe that’s the way to get deleted from their lists.
The best advice is to get a new email name and just send it the real people you know, plus real places with integrity, like your online accounts.
Get a separate free email for signing up for websites website or to buy things online from ebay, etc. When that starts to get spam just abandon it for a new one.
Both Yahoo and Hotmail have good spam filters, and may sometimes put actual mail (like mail from SDMB) in their “bulk” bins. But neither will intentionally pass your name on to list makers. Just make sure your name is unique. A common mistake is to think "I’ll just use my name and add a digit. If they say it’s been taken I’ll try the next digit until it’s available. "That’s wrong because while JackMiller19 may be available, that doesn’t mean it was never used. If it was used and abandoned, it will still be on spam lists. So make it really unique to avoid that residual spam.
Ah the joy of owning a domain…
free registration stuff Junk@mydomain.com
outlook rule From: Junk@mydomain.com -----> move to folder: junk
occasionally empty when the number rolls into the 500’s
Nah, use Spam Assassin and delete them from your list. Permanantly. 
If you’re on Comcast, you can go to their webmail and in your account preferences, you can create a list of people whose e-mails are allowed through to your inbox. That works a lot better than creating an ongoing list of who is banned. Just let in the mail you want to see. I haven’t had one piece of spam in several years.
There’s plenty of ways to set this up with various software. The problem is that you’re assuming nobody will send you a valid email from an address you don’t have. This could be somethign as trivial as a friend who’s got a new address, or when you sign up to a mailing list, or whatever.
The only way to stop spam is to make it essentially impossible to send it legally, and prosecute the ones who exploit the illegal methods of doing it. This has no impact whatsoever on the massive spamhauses in China, India, South Korea, and so on, but there are ways of dealing with them as well.
The most effective way of implementing the plan I laid out above is via blackhole lists, of which SPEWS and SORBS are probably the best-known right now.
Blackhole lists work two ways: First, they drop spam on the floor by refusing to carry email (and, sometimes, any network traffic whatsoever) originating from a list of known spam-friendly ISPs and domains. Second, they make the non-spamming customers of spam-friendly ISPs angry enough to either harass their ISP into changing its ways or find an ISP that isn’t on everyone’s shit list.
(Those spamhauses in Asia have been on SPEWS and/or SORBS for years and probably aren’t coming off, much to the relief of everyone who subscribes to those lists.)
More broadly, they work by making mainstream ISPs unwilling to tolerate spammy customers. This relegates spammers to the back-alley Internet of dedicated spamhauses, ISPs that make a large percentage of their profit from spammy customers, and compromised machines, computers that have been turned into spam-spewing zombies by the Windows Worm of the Month. Spam from the former, which is still mostly legal, is effectively blocked by blacklisting. Spam from the latter, which is most certainly illegal, can be stopped through legal means.
(Spam from the latter could also be stopped if Microsoft ever took security seriously. But now I’m just dreaming.)
Well, about a month ago, I used a people finder service to locate an old friend. I was able to locate her and created an email account just for her to use. Today I got my first spam hit to that account.
Even this isn’t guaranteed to stop spam. Many spammers have long since stopped buying lists of (supposedly) valid e-mail addresses in favour of simply generating them at random. For any given domain name – say, example.com – they’ll send their spam to addresses of the form <word>@example.com and <word><digits>@example.com, where <word> is any dictionary word or personal name, and <digits> is one or more numbers. Some use even more sophisticated algorithms.
If you’re going to create a special e-mail address for the purpose of avoiding spam, then you’d best create one composed of a long, random string of numbers and digits. Unfortunately, such addresses can be fiendishly difficult to memorize, so don’t expect any of your friends and relatives to be able to e-mail you without using their addressbook.
I liked the pay to send method, charging 1/10 of a cent per email. Free email services can give you a few cents to start you off as payment for filling out a online survey. This would destroy those evergrowing spam lists, and the spammers would start sending only to those who reply IMHO.
That would kill listservs with more than a few subscribers, and you can kiss e-mail notification features on message boards and other services goodbye. Even at a tenth of a cent per message, it would cost millions for eBay to send out “bidding on this item is ending soon” emails.
Meh, if it’s that important they can migrate to a message board. It’s worth it to eliminate spam.
Yeah, that’s true, but I personally would gladly pay a couple bucks or so a year total for the automated email services I get in exchange for getting hardly any spam (I imagine that hijacked-computer spam would still be rife, but law enforcement would take it much more seriously since it would lead to thousands of dollars in costs for the hijacked computer owner.)
Wouldn’t work. Two reasons;
A great deal of today’s spam comes through compromised computers. That 1/10 cent cost wouldn’t be born by the spammer, but by the poor sap whose computer is sending them.
Plenty email services manage to generate enough income supplying a free service. You can’t force them to start charging unless you are in a position to introduce a global tax. Otherwise those who did bring in your 1/10 cent charge would soon find themselves out of business to those who didn’t. No-one would use them, advertisers would leave them. Spammers would continue as before using free accounts.
If you mean by using the techniques employed at Gitmo, I dunno, but I’d be interested in a thorough study to find out.