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Declare war on spam - part one

Don't show spammers the white flag. Fight back with our guide to the best anti-spam tactics

It’s not big and it’s certainly not clever but spam is an unfortunate by-product of digital communication that most email users will have to contend with on a daily basis. While it’s hard to eradicate spam from your inbox altogether, there are ways to limit the amount of spam you have to weed out from the legitimate emails you receive.

A combination of common sense, anti-spam software and tweaking the settings of your email application will help to stop the tide of unsolicited email from flooding your inbox. We’ve gathered together the five best defences that will help you to combat spam, with some practical advice on putting your strategy into action.

1. Keyword filtering

A quick trawl through the email debris in the Trash folder of your email program will highlight some of the hallmarks of spam emails. An email with words in the subject line such as “Free”, “Home loans”, “Reduce your debts” and other phrases of a less than savoury nature is likely to be spam. With this in mind, one strategy for limiting the amount of unsolicited email that reaches your inbox is to filter out messages with certain keywords in the subject line.

Most email applications will have a tool that allows you to do this. If you are using Outlook Express, for example, go to the Tools menu, then click on Message Rules and select Mail. Click on New, and in the first section of the dialogue box, select the second and third options – ‘Where the Subject line contains specific words’ and ‘Where the message body contains specific words’. In the second box, select what you want to do with the junk; you can either delete it or move it to a folder. You will see some blue and black text in the third box; click on the word ‘and’ then select ‘Messages match any one of the criteria’ and click on OK. Now click on the first piece of blue text that says ‘contains specific words’ and type your banned words, one by one, into the first box, clicking Add after each one. When you have finished, click on OK, and do the same for the other piece of blue text, ‘contains specific words’. Click on OK to finish.

2. Set up a white list

Using keyword filtering, you should see a dramatic reduction in the amount of spam you receive. It won’t totally eradicate spam from your inbox, though, as some spam messages will feature seemingly innocuous words in the subject line. A more dramatic approach is to set up what is known as a white list: a list of recognised email addresses from which you are happy to receive emails. If you do this, though, be aware that only messages from addresses on the white list will be allowed through.

To create a white list in Outlook Express, go to the Tools menu, click on Message Rules, and select Mail. Click on New, and in the first section of the dialogue box, tick the first option, ‘Where the From line contains people’. In the second section, scroll down and tick the box marked ‘Stop processing more rules’. In the third box, click on the blue text that reads ‘contains people’ and follow the instructions. Either type a person’s name in and press Add, or click the Address Book button and double-click the names you want to add, then press OK. Click on OK again when you have finished adding names, and again to make the rule, then OK again to finish. Be aware, though, that excluding receipt of messages from all senders bar those you specifically name will block legitimate emails from any unrecognised senders. Don’t use white-listed email accounts when ordering goods online – unless want your emailed receipt to be discarded.

Written by Emilie Martin for Computeractive magazine

This article was created: 9 January 2007.
This article was last edited: 19 February 2007.

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