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The recent flood of junk e-mail from
the Mydoom virus overwhelmed a lot of
people’s e-mail systems. Nearly two weeks
after the outbreak, I’m still getting an
inordinate amount of junk mail as a result
of the virus. My anti-virus program prevents
me from becoming infected or spreading it to
other people, but the anti-spam filter built
into my e-mail program does nothing to keep
these messages from clogging my inbox.
Fortunately, with many e-mail programs,
there are ways to filter out such messages
as well as ways to highlight potentially
important mail and even sort your inbox into
folders, to help you better organize your
messages.
Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora
and the free e-mail programs that come with
the Netscape and Mozilla browsers all
support filtering, sorting and color coding
e-mail. AOL Windows users can take advantage
of these and other advanced features by
downloading the free AOL Communicator at
keyword “communicator.”
The steps involved and granularity of the
filtering depends on the e-mail program but
most allow you to assign colors to mail
based on who it’s from or text contained in
the subject or body. In addition you may be
able to automatically sort important (or
unimportant) mail into folders.
For example, a lot of the mail containing
the virus has the subject line “hi,” “test,”
or “delivery status.” To avoid becoming
overwhelmed by those messages, I’ve used
Outlook’s Rules function to automatically
move message with these words in the subject
line to a folder that I’ve called
“suspicious.” I check that folder just to be
sure it doesn’t filter out any important
mail but, so far, it has trapped hundreds of
copies of the virus and nothing important.
I also use filters to highlight important
mail. I have configured Outlook so that mail
from news organizations I work with is
highlighted in red, so I don’t miss those
messages when I scan my incoming mail. Mail
from my bill paying service, bank, credit
card companies and investment brokers are
all coded in green. I use blue to single out
mail from friends and family. Any other mail
I get, whether important or not, is in
black. I still look at that mail – it may
very well be from my readers, radio
listeners, or other important people – but I
make sure I don’t miss the mail that’s color
coded. Outlook allows you to establish
“rules” based on specific words in the
subject, sender field or even the body of
the message. Based on whether a message
meets the criteria you establish, you can
assign it a color, move it to a special
folder or place a copy of it in a folder.
You can even have Outlook play a special
sound to alert you to the arrival of a
message from a particular person or display
the message in a special “alert window” so
you can’t possibly miss it.
How you configure these rules depends on
what version of Outlook you use. With most
versions you would select “Rules” or “Rules
and Alerts” from the Tools menu. Some
versions allow you to color code messages
from individuals by clicking on a message
from someone and then clicking on the
organize icon on the toolbar.
Outlook 2003 has option that allows you to
create a search folder for specific people.
You start by using the search feature to
find e-mail from that person and then select
options followed by “save as search folder.”
From then on, all mail from that person (or
organization) will be in a new search folder
as well as your inbox. By the way, this
method does not waste much disk space,
because it just puts a pointer to the
original message in the search folder, it
doesn’t make a copy of the actual message.
Outlook Express, the e-mail program that
comes with Windows, has a less sophisticated
filtering and color coding feature that
nevertheless allows you to color code
messages or assign them to folders. The good
news is that the process is quite easy. Just
select Message Rules from the tools menu,
select mail, click on New and establish your
criteria based on who the message is from,
what the subject line contains or specific
words in the text. Mail that meets that
criteria can be moved or copied to a
specified folder, deleted, forwarded to
someone or highlighted with your choice of
colors.
Eurdora, Mozilla, Netscape and other
programs have similar filtering methods that
are typically configured through the
program’s Tools menu.
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