The instructions happen to be for Eudora, because that is the email program that I myself use. Effectiveness will be different for each program (obviously), but by filtering my incoming mail properly I have been able to rid my daily mail of a good portion of the make money quick offers and other junk email I used to have to sift through.
Granted not everyone on the Internet wants to receive email about the latest moneymaking opportunity. If you are getting a lot of unsolicited email, here is one way to manage your email more effectively using Eudora Pro 3.0 email program.
Eudora Pro version 3.0 has filters that can be set to scan incoming email and then perform a certain function with that email. For example: You could program it to take all messages that have "$$$" anywhere in the body of the message and transfer them automatically to a special mail folder for reading at a later time or for discarding purposes.
You can program Eudora to scan for domain names in the headers of a message or characters in the subject heading (!!!) or anything you want. The first thing you'll need to do is download the program:
Download Eudora Pro
If you already have a copy of Eudora Pro 3.0, then the next thing to do is create a special mail folder where your SPAM messages will be transferred to. You can simply direct Eudora to transfer them to the trash can, but I would not recommend this, as occasionally you may get one "real" email message that is filtered because it meets the SPAM filter criteria. If you transfer to a folder, you can check it from time to time to see if any "real" mail has slipped through the cracks.
Creating a Spam
mailbox/Mailbox
- In Eudora, click on "Mailbox", then "New".
- Name the new mailbox "Hold for Review" and do NOT check the Make it a mailbox box.
Programming a Filter
- Click on "Tools", then "Filters".
- Place a Checkmark in the "Incoming" box, and then click "NEW" in the
lower left corner.
- Now click on the button to open a dropdown menu by where it says:
"Header".
- Select "<< Any Recipient >>"
- Scroll down in the box underneath and click on: "doesn't contain"
- Next to where it says "doesn't contain" put your e-mail address, such
as username@imbris.net
- Now move down the screen to where it says: "Action". You can program up to 5 actions that Eudora will perform if it detects an incoming message
that meets the criteria you have just programmed into the filter. Let's
program it to automatically transfer these messages into our Hold for
Review mailbox.
- Click on Action, then select "Transfer To". Click on the Grey bar and
then select the Hold for Review mailbox you just created.
- We recommend putting and keeping this filter at the very end of your
filter list. That way, if you use "Skip Rest" on any or all of the
filters above this one, the message will not get to the SPAM filter.
Otherwise, a message can be filtered from "In" to "I-Sales" (for example
;), and then from "I-Sales" to "Hold for Review".
- The last thing you'll need to do is save this filter. At the top of the screen, click on "File" and then "Save".
Now your Incoming email will be filtered for any messages that contain xyz.com in the headers of the message, and those messages will automatically be transferred to your Spam folder without you even seeing them. I would recommend that you check the Spam folder once a week.
You can even program it to play a wav.file (sound) to let you know when a message has been transferred to the spam folder. You can download sounds for announcing Spam Here, and download sounds for announcing email Here.
We have just installed one filter, but there are many filters that you may want to install. There are a few that come up really frequently, which should be added to your list of filters. Filtering incoming messages for "(Any Header Contains) iemmc" should work nicely to reduce the amount of bulk mail you get from those nice people. IEMMC "claims" to be a global remove list, however when I entered my E-Mail address on their site I started getting junk mail messages from their domain almost immediately, so I'll let you be the judge.
Another would be to filter text in the body of the message for:
Imbris maintains a large list of domains known to send SPAM, but it gets to be very time consuming and spammers get far too good at changing domains. Here's another method which works very effectively:
An alternative method to filtering by domains is to set Eudora to accept only email that is addressed specifically to you, and filter everything else to your SPAM folder or the trash. The majority of the bulk email messages do not have your address in the TO: header, but have a list address that they use to distribute the SPAM. To set up Eudora in this manner, create the Spam mailbox as you did earlier and:
- In Eudora, select TOOLS > FILTERS, and then click on NEW.
- From the Header drop-down menu, choose "TO:"
- From the next drop-down menu, choose "Doesn't Contain"
- To the right of that drop-down menu, insert your E-Mail address, or
the preamble. For example if my email address was johnny@smith.com, I
would insert: johnny
- Under "Action", choose "Transfer"
- Click on the gray bar to select which box to transfer messages that aren't specifically addressed to you to either your Spam mailbox or the Trash.
Now all mail that doesn't have your specific address in the TO: area will be transferred to the mailbox or folder of your choice.
Using filters with a program such as Eudora is a real time-saver. It is important to filter to a special Spam folder instead of the trash can because some messages may meet the filter criteria for whatever reason, but be legitimate. If you set Eudora so that it makes a sound when transferring an incoming message to your Spam folder, then it will be easy for you to know when a message is identified by the filters. I check my Spam folder once per week for legitimate messages, which I can usually tell just by the Subject heading, and then highlight all and delete.
A Tip
Here's a way to prevent the SPAM scum robots from gleaning your e-mail address from a HTML page -- and maybe even from e-mail publications and newsgroups. When you enter a mailto in a Web page, format it as follows:
mailto:%20yourname@yourdomain.com
It works just fine when someone clicks on it, but when the robots pick it up they end up with an invalid address.
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