Phishing sites from apple website

Question

I think I know the answer to this but I'll see if some of you who are way smarter than me have a solution.
I was on the Apple website, truly the Apple website, as I have a permanent link on the bar to Apple. When I was shutting down the Safari window from viewing the Apple website, another window popped up saying I could register to win an iPad. Now I always ignore these kinds of things on my Windows machine since I know they're garbage but never experiencing one on my MAC and leaving the Apple site, I never even thought this one might be phishing. I entered my email on the first screen and clicked next and then it started asking a whole lot more detailed questions which I promptly said some unrepeatable words and shut down the window. Now I get small mountains of spam to my Apple email which I've never had before. Other than changing my email address, is there any way to stop the spam? I mark everything as junk but the Apple mail program still lets it through, albeit a different colored message, and makes me delete it. Is there anything that will bounce emails marked as spam from the senders at the server level so the same address can't send me any more garbage? I was hoping marking the emails as spam/junk that Apple was utilizing this at the server level to identify spammer IP's and addresses and blocking them from getting to our email much like gmail does. Thanks for any advice in advance.
LSC

Answer 1

Bouncing spam will do no good, since the senders are almost certainly using fake return addresses. All you'd accomplish is getting an "invalid address" message back.
Since you're now on probably dozens of spam lists and almost certainly will continue to get onto more, changing your email address is in all likelihood the most effective thing to do. Spammers do a lot to disguise their junk from spam filters, so stuff always can get through. I've found SpamSieve to be more effective at blocking than Apple's junkmail filter, so you can give that a try first if you wish:
http://c-command.com/spamsieve/
If you're using MobileMe email, Apple's junkmail filter isn't very sophisticated; most email providers' anti-spam filters aren't since they can't risk being overly aggresive and thereby blocking valid emails. If you use some other email provider, discuss the issue with your provider. Changing your email address is probably the only good solution, though. I've had to do that two or three times in the last few years due to spam. I use Spam Gourmet, a nifty free service that allows you to set up "temporary" email addresses for use with sites you don't completely trust, and that's cut down massively on spam. I've still had vendors from whom I purchased things sell my email address to spammers, though.
It's unlikely you have any spyware on your system unless the web site downloaded something that you then allowed to install. More likely you just had a delayed site hijack/tag from another web site (not Apple's) that popped up that window on a window close. Those aren't uncommon, particularly if you don't have the "block popups" set on your web browser.
Regards.