Chris,
I know what you mean. I'm sick of all of the spam as I'm sure most others are. If I get another email from a high level Nigerian official wanting to use my bank account to transfer funds from the Oil Ministry accounts, or from someone who has sexual attraction to barnyard animals, or who want to sell me Viagra, the list goes on and on... I could scream!!

I use the filters that you can set up to filter out emails containing specific words. Mine currently filters out about 90% and sends them to Deleted folder as soon as they come in. It is not perfect as I find some real mail gets sent to deleted. You could probably build something to scan email in you inbox and delete it if not from someone on a preferred list or your contacts list and I would not be surprised if there are not some commercial products to do this. Some email providers use "spam filters" but again it is not perfect.

Something that really irks me is unsolicited email that arrives in my inbox that is set to automatically spawn a link to some web site as soon as you click the line to delete it. I use Outlook Express (version 5 at that time) and I have the preview at the bottom of the screen. On a couple of ocassions, when I was scanning through the list as soon as that particular item was highlighted, it launched IE and navigated to some disgusting web site set IE to full screen with no menu or title bar to allow you to get out. It hid the start bar and would not allow you to switch and terminate tasks with task manager. I ended up shutting down with the power button. It was really infuriating.

Perhaps we need a "NO CALL LIST" for email with stiff penalties for sending email to those who sign up. Or better, as you suggested, have a way to only allow your preferred list of correspondents to get through and automatically bounce back all others to its source as Sorry Wrong Number.... This is a big world and you want to leave lines of communication open, but just having an email address should not be taken as an invitation to be bombarded with some of the most disgusting perversions and scams that most spammers are promoting.

Just my rant of the day

Elmer