Spam is not a problem
Friday, May 30, 2003
by Mark Hurst
Get Good Experience by e-mail: e-mail update@goodexperience.com
I receive about 150 spam e-mails a day. At night, between the time I
leave the office and when I arrive in the morning, I'll get around
100 new messages - almost all of them spam. This is at least double
the amount of spam that I was getting a year ago. By next year,
I may be getting 300 spams daily. But I'm not worried.
Spam is not a problem.
I spend less than two minutes per day dealing with my incoming spam,
which is well above the average user's load. I do this without any
special spam software, external Web-mail services, or any other
plug-in. I merely use a simple method, which draws on no other
technology than a few filters in my low-tech e-mail client
(Claris Emailer, published in 1996).
Spam isn't a problem for me, and it shouldn't be a problem for you.
There are four steps to gaining control over the spam invading your
e-mail inbox:
- Step 1 (20 minutes, one time only): Learn how to create a mail
filter in your e-mail program. One resource is my free e-mail report.
- Step 2 (30 minutes, one time only): Create a few main filters that
will catch 80% of your current spam load. Here are the four that do
most of the work for me:
- Ignore (i.e. don't filter or act on) any mail that is from
someone in your address book.
- Filter to "purgatory" (a mail folder for suspected spam mails)
any e-mail containing the letters ""... i.e. filter out any
HTML mail from unknown senders.
- Filter to purgatory any e-mail with six consecutive space
characters in the Subject line.
- Automatically delete any e-mail containing any of the various
bad words that you expect to see in s-xually explicit spam.
- Step 3 (1 minute per week): Every week or two, create a new filter
for any spam message that you're receiving repeatedly. This will
raise your spam filters' accuracy over 90%.
- Step 4 (2 minutes per day): Spend a few seconds every day deleting
any spam that eludes your filters, and visually scanning your
"purgatory" folder for any legitimate mails that ended up there (and
then deleting the rest).
All told, your time investment is less than an hour to get started,
and about two minutes per day after that. The cost, of course, is
free. The return on this investment is significant: more
productivity, less stress, and more confidence in your use of
technology.
This spam solution, and many other e-mail management tips, are in my
free report, "Managing Incoming E-mail: What Every User Needs to
Know." (For those of you who read it last year, I've just updated it
with new pointers to recent articles on spam.)
Finally, I should note that there are many ways of solving the spam
problem; mine is just one. For example, many people use services
that ask senders to prove that they aren't spammers by completing an
online "test" (usually recognizing a word placed inside a graphic).
Other people hope that the government will solve the problem. (Keep
hoping.) My contention is that more technology, or more laws, may
solve the problem in the end, but for now it's up to each individual
user to make a small investment of time and effort to manage their
e-mail on their own.
Start by reading the report.
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Links:
Download the e-mail report.
Saul Hansell recently wrote a column listing seven technology and
government-based spam solutions - unfortunately with no mention of a
user-based solution like the one above.
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