Get this junk out of my Inbox!
If you’re like me, any junkmail is more than you want. I don’t need more life insurance, or drugs, or marital aids. I don’t want to refinance my home. Just leave me alone!Well, to be honest, I’m actually pretty satisfied with my filtering, and I’m just using the standard filtering we do here at DogBark, plus the built-in Junk filter in my mail client (Apple Mail). Looking at my email from today, I currently have 5 POP accounts coming in to my Inbox, and I’ve received easily a few hundred emails - call it an even 400 - from various mailing lists and newsgroups, the support line for DogBark, my personal email, etc. Looking in my Junk folder, I have roughly 50 junk messages from today, of which I marked 10. That means that I actually saw 10 messages that I didn’t want to see.What’s even more remarkable is that I have my Junk filter catching mundane reports that I simply don’t want to see - reports from vendors that I don’t want to turn off, but don’t want to see either. The number of messages that actually made it through the DogBark filters is closer to 30, and that’s with three addresses that are completely unfiltered (info@, hostmaster@, and postmaster@).How do I keep my spam down? Pretty simple:
- I’m careful who gets my email address. If a survey, store, or registration online asks for my email address, I have a “disposable” address that I give them. If I sign up for an online forum, I make sure to uncheck “display email address”. If I don’t absolutely have to give someone online an email address, I don’t.
- I constantly update my Junk mail filtering. If I get a piece of junk mail, it immediately gets marked and added to the filter in Apple Mail. This happens all through the day, not just at the end of the day, and not just once a week.
- I don’t automatically preview email, nor do I allow unattached images to display. A lot of bulk mail scripts will use a specially-encoded link to an image on their server to track what addresses get a hit, and what addresses don’t go through. If the image link isn’t loaded, they don’t get a hit, and they might drop the address - probably not, but it helps to keep those unwelcome images from displaying. Same with not using the “preview” pane in Mail. No hits, no potentially embarassing and unwelcome images popping up in my mail.
I know there’s always going to be a few to slip through. Any server-based filtering system is going to be based on a set of rules, and with something that changes as often as the content of spam, there’s bound to be a few that just aren’t caught. Human intuition is always going to be more accurate, but a combination of automated filtering and intuition, plus a little common sense, will keep your inbox clean and happy!