May 19, 2010

My Email Filters Are Working

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

Bonk!

That’s the noise I hear when my email program catches porn spam floating into my inbox.

Bonk!

Before the bonk sounds, I know that the email has arrived and its been deleted. The final “rule” applied to the message is to play the bonk sound, which is my auditory clue that the problem has been dealt with.

Spam doesn’t seem to be a huge problem anymore. Occasionally I see a raft of unusual spam messages in my inbox. I just assume that somehow the Bad Guys figured a way around my ISP’s spam filters, because eventually the tiny flood stops.

There are some specific messages, however, that miss the ISP’s filters. For those messages, I created my own mail rules to deal with them.

Most of the porno spam I get comes from a specific domain. After I got a few of those offensive messages, and tired of deleting them, I created a mail rule.

Mail rules, or filters, allow you to process incoming mail before you see it. Most email programs have such a feature.

You create the rule or filter based on the message subject, sender, recipient, or other items in the message. You can create an auto reply, send the message to a specific mailbox, color-code the message, delete the message, play a sound, and so on.

Essentially, the rule for my porn filter worked like this:

  1. If the incoming message is from the domain something.xxx
  2. Delete the message

That’s a pretty simple rule, but it’s about all you need. The problem with that rule in my email program was that I never new when the rule was working. So I modified the rule:

  1. If the incoming message is from the domain something.xxx
  2. Delete the message
  3. Play the BONK sound

With the new rule, I now have the bonk sound play, which confirms that the message has been dealt with. It also lets me know that the filter has worked and, sadly, I’m still getting porn spam from that domain.

Of course, I don’t need any sound to play. The filter works, obviously, because I don’t get any more porn spam from that site. Back when I used the Eudora email program, there were statistics presented on the mail rules created. I liked that option.

When you reviewed your mail rules in Eudora, you could see which were working and which were never used. It was easy to delete the ones that were never used. For efficiency’s sake, you could move the rules that were used often up to the top of the list. It was a good system, but I no longer use Eudora.

The bonk sound seemed like a good work-around for the lack of statistical information on my current program’s mail filters. So now I know that it’s working, and there porn stays out of my computer system.

2 Comments

  1. So which email program do you use now? I personally use Thunderbird, but I find some features lacking.

    Comment by sriksrid — May 19, 2010 @ 8:59 am

  2. I use the Mail program on the Mac, and on the PC I use the Windows Mail program.

    Windows Mail isn’t that bad, and I was disappointed that Microsoft threw it to the curb for Windows 7.

    Comment by admin — May 19, 2010 @ 9:03 am

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