Overcoming Email Spam

If you’re like me you get a ton of spam email each and every hour of each and every day. It can feel quite overwhelming especially when you need to wade through it all just to find that one teeny-tiny little email admist several hundred pieces of spam. Good news, it doesn’t have to be like that and if you bear with me I will give you some ways to deal with email spam.

What is email spam?

Email spam in the most general sense is any email you receive that is unsolicited. You’re probably thinking to yourself “well that’s about 99.9% of my email” and that may or may not be true. I’ll explain more in a moment. Before I do I want to make it clear that for our purposes we will consider spam email to be any email you do not desire to reach you.

How can all these places have my email address?

Chances are very high that you gave it to them. You probably went online somewhere and filled in a form that required your email address and submitted it. What you most likely didn’t do was read the terms and conditions before you submitted that form (along with you email address) which said something to the effect of “By submitting this form you are giving ABC corporation the right to sell and/or share your email address with authorized third parties including other advertisiers…” It doesn’t take doing something like that more than once or twice to find your inbox overflowing with spam.

Isn’t spam illegal?

It is in the United States, per the Can-Spam act, but speeding is illegal and look how many people obey that law. Can-Spam provides for the following protections.

• Bans false or misleading header information
• Prohibits deceptive subject lines
• Requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method
• Requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender’s valid physical postal address

Unfortunately none of those rules apply outside of the US and the spammers know this and they setup camp offshore and keep on sending out spam.

Is there actually a way to stop spam?

No. There are ways to minimize it and that’s what we will be focusing on here.

Email spam basics

Before you do anything you need to become familiar with your email program. By program I mean either the program you open to check your email, or the webbased interface (web browser). In almost all cases you’ll have an option for filters. Filters allow you to check email for certain criteria as it reaches your inbox and categorize it based on that criteria. We’ll be working with Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Thunderbird filters. I’m sure once you see how filters work on one you’ll have a very good idea on all the rest.

Hotmail spam filtering

Use the following steps to setup filtering protection with Hotmail:

1. Log into your Hotmail account
2. In the upper right corner click “options”
3. Click “mail” (far left side of page)
4. Click “Junk email protection”
5. Click “Junk email filter”
6. Set the filter to “exclusive” which is the highest level of protection and click “ok”
7. On the next screen I usually do “Return to options”, but feel free to experiment with providing a list of email addresses
8. Click “mail” again (far left side)
9. Click “Custom filters”
10. Click “new” up near the top and then click advanced filter
11. At this point you should see a screen that looks somewhat like this



12. Setup a rule for filtering. In general it should be pretty self explanatory, but in case you need a description of the steps I’ve taken a moment to write them out for you.
    • Step 1: Filter Criteria set as follows - If (from name) (equals) (bob)
    • Step 2: Folder - Put a mark in “Delete these messages”

A quick look at the filter shows us what it does. In step one we told the filter to look for any name in the email’s “from” line(s) that say “bob”. In the second step we told it to automatically delete and emails “from bob”. I don’t reommend deleting the incoming emails before you have a chance to look at it. Instead the better option would either be to have the email moved to the “junk folder” or to create your own customizef folder that the mail is moved to.

Yahoo Spam Filtering

Yahoo spam filtering is a lot like Hotmail except you have an option called “Spam Protection” under the mail options. The usage is pretty self explanatory and I’ll let you figure it out on your own. If you read what it tells you to do on the page you can’t possibly go wrong. Here is what the Spam Control program looks like.

Once you’ve set that up don’t forget to goto “Filters” under the mail options and manually setup filters in nearly the same way as you did for the Hotmail filters. Again by now this should be pretty self explanatory if you take your time to do it.

Gmail spam filtering

Gmail is personally my favorite web based email client. Aside from the huge amount of storage (3 gigs and growing) I find it easy to use and maintain. Login, goto settings, then to filters, then click create new filter. Now you’ll be greeted with a filter setup page. Just spend a bit of time figuring out what you want to filter and what to do with it once the email has been intercepted. Here’s a picture of what the Gmail filter area looks like.

You’ll notice that instead of being able to drop down the settings form a predetermined list you’ll now have to input the words you want to specify for filtering.

Is there any other ways to stop spam?

Before answering the question let me be clear. It is impossible to “stop” spam, however there are many ways to help reduce it.

1) You can go with a third party service that will filter your email through their filters and determine if it is spam or not. Advantages:

• Not something you would need to maintain
• Can potentially save you hours and hours of work
• Generally have a much more robust filtering system
• Are usually “kid safe” meaning if requested they will filter out adult content

Disadvantages:

• Usually relatively expensive
• Can cause lost emails if the filtering is done improperly
• Lots of spammers have worked out ways to get past it.

What are some examples of 3rd party filtering?

Sure here’s two of them.
• Appache Spam Assassin
• Spam Rejection

2) You can spend a few hours opting out. Advantages:

• You can keep track of it
• Ensures no email will come from that address in most cases

Disadvantages

• Sometimes is used by spammers as a way to help them confirm your address exists
• Very time consuming
• Doesn’t often take effect for several weeks or months meanwhile you’re getting buried under spam mail

I advise not wasting your effort with the opt-out process, but if you do then try to get other filters in place first and opt-out from the things that get through the filters and then throw the filters on them as well.

Further reading

Since email spam and filtering is such a robust topic I thought it was important to give you some additional reading resources.

1. Wiki’s Email Spam
2. Federal Government’s spam information
3. Fight Spam
4. Coalition against unsolicited commercial emails
5. Setting up Gmail filters
6. 20 ways to use Gmail filters
7. Yahoo! mail filters
8. Yahoo! mail filters (2)
9. Hotmail filtering
10. Filter settings, Hotmail

If you take the time and start using some of these methods to combat inbox spam you’ll notice a sharp decline in how much email you find youself needing to deal with.

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