Of late I have been using yahoo mail as my primary email client. I have had this account since 98. Over the years spam has increased to my account owing to the general increase in spam in internet traffic. Yahoo has pretty good spam filtering technique by default but a lot of the spam still manages to reach the mailbox. To block this kind of spam yahoo provides 15 free filters that you can use to stop these unwanted messages from clogging your mailbox and deliver them in a location of your choice (like the trash folder for e.g.). Sometimes I find that over a period of a few hours there is more unwanted mail in my trash, then in the bulk mail folder. That means the filters that I have setup are Kicking a$$ baby! Things that excite geeks...
Here are some of the filters that I use. I created these after observing certain patterns in the spam mail that I used to get.
If subject contains "Free, Porn, Mortgage, Loan,Sex,Credit" Deliver to trash.
Some specific ones
If subject contains "ShopNow, E-Alert Site" trash it as well.
If address contains "@c, @a,@j,@z,@f" trash it as well. Warning- These generic type filters may filter out genuine messages also known as false positives in geek speak. So once you have set up such filters you should start checking your trash folder regularly to see if you have filtered out some genuine messages. This way you can add a filter for the genuine messages to be delivered to the in box. There is something that should be remembered is the sequence of these filters. So if there is a filter which trashes all messages from any address which has a "@c" but if you have a friend whose email ID is chimp@chittanoga.net then his/her email will get filtered. You see that mail in your trash and you set up another filter saying that if email address contains chimp then deliver to mailbox. Your beloved chimp sends you another email with snaps of his chimp group but it never reaches you. You call him up and complain and he complains that you don’t check your mail and you get angry and call him a monkey, thus pissing the chimp off who then sends a gang of chimps after you and now you are afraid to walk out of your house. To avoid getting in a situation like this you should go and see where exactly is your filter related to chimp. If it appears below the "@c" filter then it wont work.. by now the solution should be obvious.
Some "obvious" tips to lessen your spam mail. These may not be obvious to some so I am listing them here.
1. Use two email Ids at least. One for personal work, i.e. the one that you physically give out to friends/family and use to communicate with others. The second one should be used when you register at some weird websites that you know you won’t visit more than once or can’t be trusted with your information. I use hotmail for these as their service sucks in any case.
2. When you post on news groups etc put in weird words in your email id. For e.g. Abhinav_SPAM_YOUR_MOTHER at yahoo.com. Now add a note in your post saying remove all letters in caps. This way mail harvesting programs can’t automatically pick up your id from your post and add it to the 1000 mail/min spam list.
3. Do not reply to spam (isn’t that kind of obvious?) No do not reply to "unsubscribe" address listed in the spam mail. This will only confirm that your mail id is legit and there by increasing junk mail to your account.
You can also use the "spam" button which your will see along side of move, delete buttons when you open a particular mail. This just adds the address to your blocked address list. You can block only 100 addresses this way. Use them judicially.
With this post, i am officially a "power user of Yahoo mail".
Disclaimer- I dont work for yahoo or any of its subsidary.
