Many of you may know about Gmail's plus trick. It's a relatively old but effective trick for spam prevention. You'll be surprised to know that this trick also works in Hotmail.

Suppose you have an email address like happynewyear@hotmail.com. If you add a '+' sign after your email username, Hotmail will disregard anything between the + and @ signs. Emails sent to happynewyear+anything@hotmail.com will still reach your Hotmail inbox (happynewyear@hotmail.com).

This is a very good method for tracking spammers. Let's say you used an email alias like happynewyear+forum@hotmail.com for signing up for a forum. Now whenever you receive spam addressed to the above alias, you'll know the exact site which sold your email address to the spammers.

To get rid of the spam coming from the alias, you can use Hotmail's Sweep feature to delete all the messages addressed from that source and automatically block them from appearing in your inbox in the future.