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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week March 9, 2005 |
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Building your own spam traps with
Outlook I read a
newspaper article recently that a lot of people are actually giving up using
the internet because of all the junk mail they get.
They’re going back to using snail mail. This is really a shame, but spam or
junk mail is an enormous problem that everyone is fighting. Today I
want to talk about creating your own junk mail filters if you use Microsoft
Outlook for email, which the majority of web users do. Most
ISP’s today have filters they put on your incoming mail to filter out
spam, but there’s still a considerable amount that gets through those
filters and shows up in your inbox. Then YOU have to manually delete these
offensive emails. Outlook
is highly customizable, and today we’ll talk about creating a simple
rule to handle spam
that hits your In-box. The
concept will be that we’ll create a rule that scans the subjects of
emails and looks for certain words that spammers usually use – and then
we’ll divert these emails from your Inbox to your junk email folder, so
that periodically you can open that folder and scan and then delete them all. You can
listen to this now on the radio to get the concept, and later you can get the
specifics steps of how to do this from my transcript of this program which is
already on my Raw Bytes website Raw
Bytes. Open
Outlook and click on Tools, and then click on Rules and Alerts – Email
Rules Tab - you’ll see that you can create rules about handling email
that comes into your inbox. Click on New Rule, and click Start creating a rule from a template
– then
click on Move messages with specific words in the subject to a folder Below
that – under Step 2 –
Click on the Highlighted Specific
words choice - another
window will open which allows you to type in a word or phrase - let’s type a spammer term online pharmacy
– then click Add to add this
word to your rules dictionary of known spammer rules – then click ok Now click
on the highlighted Move it to the
specified folder choice – and you will see a folder list –
and click on the Junk Email folder
– and then click ok again Now click
on Next to get to the next screen
– and under the Step 2 section
at the bottom you will see the rule that you just created, which should
say something like: Apply
this rule after the message arrives, with online pharmacy in the subject
– and move it to the junk email folder. Now click on next 3 times to view 3 different screen
related to this rule you’ve created which you don’t have to do
anything on, and you’ll come to a screen which lets you Name this rule – call it spamtrap and click Finish . Now
it’s important to test the rule, by sending an email to yourself with the words online pharmacy in the subject,
and see what happens. So create
an email to yourself with online pharmacy in the subject and send it to
yourself. Then click on
send/receive and watch what happens.
You
should see Outlook receive a message, and then you should see an item appear
in your junk mail folder. Click on your Junk mail folder, and there it is
– the message you just send yourself with online pharmacy in the
subject. Congratulations – you’ve built your first spam trap! Next week
we’ll get into adding new words to your spam trap, and other options. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2005 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa
99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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