I've brought up this issue before, but the last time it was funny.

It is no longer funny to me just how many junk mails I get each day. It used to take me about three minutes to get rid of my junk mail before I could start reading my actual mails. Nowadays it takes me up to fifteen minutes to get rid of my junk mail.

I use Thunderbird, and it has a pretty good junk mail filter. But it takes a while for Thunderbird to download the mails and parse through them. So, I'll start the program, let it run, and go look on the forum for new applicants while it does it's thing. Eventually I return to find somewhere in the area of 150 new emails since I last checked (roughly 8 hours before). Usually about 10 to 20 of these are legitimate emails.

I spend the next few minutes scrolling through to make sure that none of my legitimate emails have been marked as junk - Every week or so I'll find one that was very important that was marked as junk, while somehow "Microsoft Off|ce Pro -New Vista/XP Edition- 79$, Save 999.95$ 0ff Retai|" manages to slip through and not get marked as junk.

Eventually I run Tools -> "Delete Mail Marked as Junk in Folder", and I'm ready to start reading mails.

This ritual has gotten so frustrating and time consuming. And the worst part of junk mail, in my opinion, is the fact that I get them constantly all day long and Thunderbird notifies me of it every time. Every time I see it pop up in the bottom-right of my screen with something like "We provide for you a real advantage to turn her on" (as it did when I wrote the last sentence), I'm left wondering: Why doesn't it check to see if it's junk before notifying me that I have new email? and then Why does it notify me at all? Can I turn that damn feature off?

I get roughly 500 junk mails every day (just got another one). That's 20 junkmails per hour, or one every three minutes.

How many do you get, and how do you handle them?