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Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Filtering email and creating rules with Outlook

If you receive repeated emails with the same subject line or text in the email you can create a rule that will put these emails directly into your trash or Junk E-mail folder.

1. Right click on the message in your inbox. A pop up will allow you to select Create Rule.
2. If you are looking to auto delete or move email to a Junk folder simply follow the on screen guide.
3. If you are looking to delete or move to Junk E-mail folder something contained in the body text click Advanced Options. There you may select from many options the most common being “specific words in the body.”
4. If you select one of the advanced options with a check box it will put the item into the Step 2 block below. Once the blue link is in that block click on it to establish the rule. Select OK and continue thru the step by step procedures.

PAonteweb.com provides hosting with several additional spam reducing features. Nobody can completely stop spam from getting to your inbox but hundreds can be reduced to a handful. We use Spamhaus in our firewall and can also tighten your security using Spam Assassin. Spamhaus is automatic and retrieves daily lists of known spammers for automatic filtering. Spam Assassin is a numbering system that allows you to adjust your filtering from 1 to 10. Ten is least aggressive. Setting the number here can be difficult. While Spam Assassin suggest 5 PAontheweb suggests 3 for most clients. We have also set our Spam Assassin down to 1.5 as the system does allow for using decimals. PAontheweb.com receives thousands of spam emails every day. However, by setting our system down to 1.5 99% of spam is removed. The only trouble with this is we do miss the occasional email that is legitimate.

On the positive side we have created contact forms that use letters and numbers on the form that must be put in the correct order before the message is sent. This is referred to as Captcha and is something you have most likely seen on many websites. It only allows the information to be sent that you want filled out. If you put in a comments block so people can type whatever they want you may still get some spam this way. This is not Robotic spam it is an actual human being typing in the junk email or someone using a form filler to get thru. However, a human must still provide the Captcha code greatly reducing this type of spam.

Because much of the world lives in poverty unscrupulous people take advantage of using human spammers in foreign countries like India, Pakistan, Brazil and other emerging nations. These spammers cannot be completely stopped. However, PAontheweb.com uses a add on program to the forms with Captcha that detects if there are several hyperlinks. More than 2 hyperlinks is indicative of a spam form email. Our system auto deletes anything with more than 2 hyperlinks in a form.

If you’re having trouble with spam why not give us a call or fill out our contact form. However, once an email address is known to the spammers we will suggest you change your email address and never post it on a website for robots to read again. Never use email addresses like info@, webmaster@, sales@ etc unless you have extremely good filtering. These email addresses are assumed to exist by most spammers trying to get to you. These email addresses are common in business. We have many suggestions for you to reduce spam.