Tips & Tricks-March 2003

Organize Your Email!

Between three email accounts, I probably get somewhere between 30 and 50 emails a day, depending on how many spam emails I receive. Even without the spam, I get enough emails every day to have to find ways to pre-sort and pre-filter the mail. I subscribe to a number of newsletters on-line and belong to some Yahoo groups that send emails so I can assign rules to help pre-sort the mail.

Most email clients, like Outlook Express, Outlook or Netscape Mail, allow you to create folders in your Inbox and to define rules that will route the mail to those folders. So the first step in getting organized is to create some folders in your inbox for each of the groups you will use. Even if you are not able to define rules that will adequately route the mail, you can still use the folders to keep your email manageable by routing the mail manually.

You might have a folder for mail from your family members, one for newsletters from Microsoft, one for PCC business, one for purchase confirmations and one for SPAM. In Outlook, you create a folder by right-clicking on the Inbox in the Folder list. One of the selections is New Folder.

You can name the folder and place it where you want it-subfolders are allowed.

With Netscape 7.0, you will create the folders in your Local Folders.

The pulldown gives you a choice of where to put the folders.

After you create the new folder, you will need to define some rules that will help route the mail. In Outlook, you go to Tools, Rules Wizard.

The above shows a number of rules that I use to route mail. The first one looks a bit odd, but I was getting a lot of spam email written in another language. The filter looks for email using the character set used in the spams. Mail to me using that character set goes straight to the trash folder. I also receive messages from NASA regarding various phenomena such as meteor showers. They all have "Spaceweather" in the sender's address. The rule has two parts. The first is the conditions, such as if the message has "Spaceweather" in the sender's address, and the second is the action to take, move the message to the NASA-SpaceScience folder.

Another example of a SPAM filter is to have a rule that states that if the email subject contains the word "Viagra" or "hot," send the message to the SPAM folder.

I can't cover all the possible rules and actions in this article because there are so many. You can use multiple conditions and actions.

In Netscape, the filtering process is done by going to Tools, then Message Filters.

The pulldown menus contain the alternatives, such as "subject" or "sender" and the conditions. Note that you can require a match for all the conditions or any of them.

Virtually all email clients have similar methods for filtering email. Most include them under Tools in the menu. At the very least, the message filters or rules will help you control and manage your email. An added bonus is that you can route possible SPAM to its own folder.

A good way to figure out the rules for SPAM is to look at the subjects of the ones you receive, note the words that are frequently used and set up the filter to find those words as part or all of the subject line.

Here's a tip I've seen in several sources about putting your email address on web sites. It reduces the convenience of being able to click on an address to open your email client with the address filled in, but it will help reduce the amount of SPAM that comes to you from that source. First, you should know that there are programs used by spammers to glean email addresses from web pages. They look for the normal configuration such as "myemail@isp.com." The trick is to insert some phrase in your real email address that will result in the spammer getting an incorrect address. An example would be "myNOJUNKemail@isp.com." The inconvenience is that the person sending the email will have to edit the address before sending the email. You can include a warning on your web page that alerts the user to the need to edit the address.

See you at the meeting.