Many dedicated email programs offer some type of options to deal with junk mail. For example, if you are using Microsoft Outlook, there are some settings than can be configured to help with junk emails - see information at this Microsoft support article: http://support.office.com/en-us/article/Overview-of-the-Junk-Email-Filter-5ae3ea8e-cf41-4fa0-b02a-3b96e21de089. Another thing that you can do is check with your email service provider to see if they offer any type of spam filtering. If options like this prove to be ineffective, a next best thing might be to consider a different email address. Sometimes, if an email address has been compromised too much, it becomes difficult to recover back to a normal situation.

The best proactive thing that you can do is to be careful who and where you give your email address to. Be aware of privacy policies that legitimate businesses follow, and be wary of participating in forwarding group emails between many people when you don't know how well others may respect your email address. Some people actually use more than one email address, one for personal private use that is carefully guarded, and another for public or bulk use, if for no other reason than to keep your most important personal email inbox relatively free of spam.