Im not sure how the default filters, usually indicated to be Low, Medium, High work but I do know i have missed some important emails while on email. Can someone clue me in as to what they look for. Also, what do i do to setup custom filters that help. I know how to Im just wondering what to filter. Do I actually set up filters for “TITS!” and CELL PHONE!" and “FREE!” any help would be much appreciated.
I just did this the other day. Let me say first that I use OE5.5, and I subscribe to several lists and daily e-mails (word of the day, etc.) In OE, you do filters under Tools > Message Rules.
(1) Each mailing list has its own subfolder in my Inbox, and its own filter.
(2) The logic of the spam filter goes like this:
Everything that’s . . .
NOT from one of my mailing lists, AND
IS NOT one of my daily e-mails, AND
DOES NOT have my email address in the To: field, AND
IS NOT from one of my friends who occasionally sends me forwards with all the addresses in the Bcc: field (These are OK by me; she’s selective, deletes headers, etc.)
. . . goes into the “Suspect Mail” folder. So far it’s all been spam, so the filter is working. If I catch anything in there that’s not spam, I can edit the filter accordingly. Otherwise I can simply delete the spam, report it, whatever.
It all depends on the sophistication of your filters. I’ve had some luck with filtering out anything with an exclamation point, or question mark in the subject (people don’t usually use punctuation, and spammers don’t realize yet that exclamation points don’t make anything important). I also include the dollar sign, but that might cause trouble in certain contexts.
Another good general rule is to discard anything that doesn’t have your e-mail address in the to: or cc: fields.
Hmm, I send and receive mail with ? and ! in the subject all the time. Dollar sign, not so much, but still . . . I guess I prefer using negative identifiers, to avoid accidentally killing a real message that happens to have a word favored by spammers in the subject line. (Although I am thinking about a positive filter for the guy who keeps asking my if I want to “IMPROVE YOUR PAKCAGE” [sic].)
IM still not sure what to do. For instance i ebay alot. What am i supposed to do, give the okay to everything from ebay, im not even sure how to do this? Any other ideas would be helpful.
Well, you could set up a “throwaway,” freebie Web e-mail account that you use just for eBay. The account I use for SDMB is one of those. (I check it every few days, and almost never get mail. It lets me remain “Scarlett67” here while using my real name for regular mail.)
go one step at a time. Set a filter to divert all email which does not have your name in the TO: line. You will see that gets rid of a lot. Then you can add more steps.
Hmm,…is this a PC or a Mac? Anyway at download.com you might search for ‘spam’ Im sure they got plenty of programs to do something about it.
Some ISPs give you less spam. My ISP blocks out any email from certain sites known to only email spam. Juno email has the least amount of spam I noticed. Hotmail seems to have a lot, right?