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Blocking Spam and other unwanted email messages

So, you've been to a few internet sites and filled out a few questionnaires, and made a few internet purchases from a couple of sites.  Now, your being inundated by SPAM, that horrible email junk that keeps cluttering up your inbox.   What should you do?

Well, a couple of things.  Sometimes there is an "unsubscribe" or "remove" feature on the email.  If the site is reputable and you recognize the sender, you may follow the directions and remove your email address from their mailing list.  If the sender is truly spamming, though, he is sending mail to anyone and everyone.  If you respond with an "unsubscribe", he knows he has a valid address and may continue to send you email, or worse yet, sell your address to others.

A useful feature of Microsoft's Outlook Express email program is the "Block Sender" feature.  In Outlook, click on the offending message, then "Message" (at the ring menu on the top of the screen) and "Block Sender".  The sender is added to your "Blocked Senders List" and all future emails received from that address will be automatically sent to your deleted folder.

To view or edit the Block Senders List, click on "Tools", "Message Rules", "Blocked Senders List".

You can also have Outlook Express automatically delete messages based on the words in the subject line, or contained in the message body.  Go about it this way:

  1. Click on "Tools" at the top of the screen, then "Message Rules", and then "Mail". 
  2. The top half of the window sets the conditions for rules.  Click on either "New" to create a new rule, or a rule in the white box to add conditions to it.
  3. Next, you set the rule in number one.  For example you might click on "Where the subject line contains specific words" or "Where the message body contains certain words".
  4. Now go to number two.  You might click the box "Move it to the specified folder", or perhaps "delete it".  If you never want to see the message at all, click on "delete it from server", which means the incoming message will be deleted from your ISP's server and never make it to your PC.
  5. Click on "OK" and you're done!

You can also have messages with the word "joke" in the subject line automatically go into a Joke folder, or forward them to another person,  automatically reply to a messgage, or any number of actions.  This is definitely one of Microsoft's better ideas!

Also, there are numerous software packages you can purchase, such as Norton AntiSpam and McAfee Spamkiller.  Many ISPs also offer anti-spam services for nominal fees. 

A Review of Norton AntiSpam

Anyone who has ever posted his/her email addy one time on the internet is familiar with spam. At one point a few months ago, before I changed my email address, I was receiving about 400 emails a day, and 390 of those would be spam. The problem with this for a business person is that you have to scan through all of those before deleting to make sure you don't miss important correspondence.

I have been using Outlook Express message rules with some success. Emails that contain certain words I would delete right off my ISP's server and never see them. Others, I would have automatically placed in my deleted folder and review them before permanently deleting. Valid emails I automatically sort into vendor price folders, my yacht club folder, etc. This is about 90% effective.

I tried a spam blocking service, but that didn't work out. Basically, it blocked 99% of all my email, and I still had to scan through hundreds of junk spams searching for good stuff before deleting, and the service sorted things before it hit my Outlook Express message rules, so that didn't work at all.

I just installed Norton Anti-spam, and I have to say that I'm impressed. I don't impress easily either. The Norton automatically added my entire address book to an approved senders list, so any email from friends, vendors, and clients was automatically allowed, with no work on my part. It seems to be about 95% effective at sorting through everything else, and somehow identifies non-spam emails from people I do not know into my in box, and effectively blocks just about everything else. In the rare instances where spam does make it into my in box, I just right click on it and select "this is spam" from a menu and I'll never see it again.

Norton Anti-spam creates an Outlook Express message rule #1 for itself, and places all identified spam in an anti-spam folder that it creates. This rule allows the processing of other message rules. What is very cool is that I merely added another rule that takes all messages that Norton has flagged as spam and moves it to my deleted folder from Norton's antispam folder. When I close outlook express, all these messages are permanently deleted.

Norton anti-spam also updates itself automatically, just like the anti-virus. All in all, an excellent program.

 

 

 

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