If you use e-mail much, you’ve probably received messages in your inbox about the latest stock price, the discount Rolex watches, or the prince from somewhere in Africa who wants to wire you money so you can send him a check and get him out of the bind that he’s in. These e-mails, called spam or junk mail, are unwelcome visitors that can drive you crazy. We all spend way too much time cleaning them out of our inboxes only to find them sitting there again the next morning.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky. If you do know what I’m talking about and you’ve struggled to manage spam in the past, I’d like to offer six tips on getting spam under control so you can spend less time deleting junk mail from your inbox and more time doing the things you love.

Set up a secondary e-mail account that you can use for any purchases you make online or anytime you have to register for a website or service. If this address gets overrun with spam, you can simply delete it and create a new one.
1. Set up rules in Outlook, Entourage, or Mac Mail. You can have these programs filter e-mails from particular addresses, particular domains, or with particular words in the subject or the body of the e-mail. Simply search the help section of the program you currently use for “rules” or “filters” to find out how to set these up.
2. When you first set up rules (or filters), instead of having suspected spam messages completely deleted, have them filtered into a junk folder or even into your inbox with the word spam added to the subject. Test your settings for a few weeks to make sure that you are not filtering anything that you actually want.
3. Use a trusted senders feature. When you do find an e-mail in your junk folder that should have been in your inbox, add the sender to your trusted senders list (also known as a white list) so that future mail from that sender will be fast-tracked straight to your inbox.
4. Check to see if your e-mail provider has a grey list feature. This has been a recent development in managing spam. When someone sends an e-mail to you and your e-mail server doesn’t recognize the incoming address, your server will reject the message temporarily and send a message back to the sender’s mail server to basically say, “server busy, try again.” The premise is that any legitimate mail server will try again and any spammer will not. When the message is sent again, it will go straight to your inbox and the sender will be put on your white list so that he or she will not be blocked in the future. All of this happens behind the scenes without you or the sender having to do anything different. Check with your e-mail host to see if you have this feature available. It’s one of the most effective spam management tools in recent years.
5. Do not set up your address as the e-mail “catch-all.” A catch-all e-mail account will receive any e-mail that is sent to a nonexistent e-mail address at your domain. At one point, this used to be a great way to catch an e-mail that happened to have a typo in the address. If someone accidentally sent a message to dve@yourdomain.com, instead of dave@yourdomain.com, that message would not be lost. It would simply go into the catch-all account. However, spammers have become much more proficient and creative in the ways that they'll load your inbox with all kinds of messages. One way they do this is to send messages to random addresses at your domain. If you have a catch all account, it will fill up with spam quickly, and if you are not checking and deleting messages regularly, your mail server space will be overrun by spam in your catch-all.

Nick’s the head customer service guy over at SnapShotWeb.com. He hates SPAM with all of this heart!


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