Number 251 - April 2004

Jean's Better Anti-SPAM Technique
from a letter from Jean Wicox, SunCoast Beeper, St. Petersburg, FL cwilcox1@tampabay.rr.com Jean Wilcox, a very knowledgable lady, and I had a bit of correspondence about my "discovery" in the previous article that I could stop leaving myself open to all sorts of chicanery by choosing NOT to open e-mail automatically with the upper and lower preview pane format. She of course is wa-a-a-y beyond me in handling this situation. This is an excerpt from her letter - Bob Thomson
....On to business, if you're still with me. Your letter was so nice that it just breaks my heart to have to tell you that I have been preaching the gospel of "no preview pane, ever", for a long time. It truly is a dangerous thing. Even a little web bug in an html has the capacity to do you in, right? I'm now using another method to try to handle the spam, and it works beautifully, but oh, boy, is it tedious!    Instead of making up Rules to keep stuff out, I made Rules to capture the good stuff. I set up a new folder I called InBox Filtered and then made a rule for every single human I correspond with, friends, relatives, club members. This takes forever. I spent most of one whole day doing it. Outlook Express main page | Tools | Message Rules | Mail - "When the FROM line contains", insert my sister's address (or whoever), then "Move it to the InBox Filtered folder and stop processing more rules". Now the good stuff hits this folder and all the rest of the day's detritus hit the regular InBox. I go in there and peruse the list and when I find something that looks legitimate, I left click it once to highlight it, then	drag it over to the InBox Filtered file for later perusal. What's left, I click the top one, shift click the last one to select all, then hit the big red Delete X at the top.    This is working very well for me and all I still have to do is find another spare day somewhere and do it all again for Fred Langa and Brian Livingston and the Register and the ads from good places I do business with, from Computers4Sure to L.L.Bean.    So to beat a dead horse some more, I don't even delete the cruddy bits one at a time; I just pick out the keepers and delete the garbage in one swell foop. So tell your friend, Ray Mills, that he might be taking the long way around by deleting his spams singly. Or so it seems to me. Actually, come to think of it, it wouldn't be necessary to make rules at all if you didn't want to. Just make a new folder for the good stuff and drag it out of the stinky heap and into the new one and delete the crap.    ..All best wishes for happy computing. Ain't life grand? Jean
Number 251 - April 2004