I have tried various Spam filters that work to a degree, but sorting o

I have tried various Spam filters that work to a degree, but sorting out the messages that I want from those that could be junk mail is still a big pain. Is there a method of identifying the stuff I want automatically?
- Frustrated in Phoenix

This question was answered on December 16, 2002. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

If you’ve been using e-mail for any length of time, you are likely getting bombarded on a daily basis with ‘Spam’, especially if you’ve made the mistake of replying to messages that claim that they will remove you from their list, if you just ask them to.

They are, in fact, just getting you to verify that your address is valid so they can continue sending you more junk and selling these ‘verified’ lists to other Spammers You should only reply to messages sent by lists in which you ‘opt-in’ or you take the chance of being victimized.

My current filter, SpamNet (cloudmark.com) has filtered over 15,000 junk messages in the last 5 months, but I still have to weed through lots of messages in my Inbox to find the ones that I really care about.

Most Spam filters create a ‘blacklist’ to determine which messages to filter If you use an e-mail program that allows you to create message rules, you can create a ‘whitelist’ for messages that you know that you want to read.

In a previous column, I explained how to use message rules to help filter out junk messages based on certain words that appear in the subject line or body text.

Message rules are also a great way to automatically sort messages from desired senders into separate folders in your e-mail, so you don’t have to search amongst all your Inbox messages to find messages from important senders.

For instance, if you are a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can tell your e-mail program to automatically place a copy of each message you receive from us in it’s own folder for easy access to everything we send.

If you have Outlook Express, start by creating a new folder by right clicking on the Inbox folder and selecting the ‘New Folder’ option Give the new folder a name like, ‘newsletters’, then click OK.

Next click on the Tools menu, then on ‘Message Rules > Mail’

Within the "New Mail Rule" dialog box, click on the "Where the Subject line contains specific people" option from the list In the ‘Select an Action…’ section, you can choose either copy or move I prefer copy, so that I get a visual reminder in my Inbox to go to the specific folder.

In the ‘Rule Description’ section, you should see two blue links, ‘contains people’ and ‘specified’ folder Click on the ‘contains people’ link and add newsletter@computerproblems.com then click OK (or you can select from your address book.)

Next, click on the ‘specified’ link, which should bring up a list of folders Choose the ‘newsletters’ folder, then press OK (New folders can also be created here.)

The final step is to give this new rule a name Type ‘newsletters’ in the ‘Name of the rule:’ box at the bottom and press OK.

This new rule will be applied to all future messages or you can tell it to sort messages that are currently in your Inbox by clicking on the ‘Apply Now’ button.

Outlook users can do something similar by going to the Tools menu then to ‘Rules Wizard’.