Cut Down On Spam

There are a number of different ways in which you can reduce the amount of spam that appears in your inbox. A Lockergnome reader recently submitted another method that you can use.

Here’s an even simpler one I use for clients and family. It assumes a decent mail client such as Mozilla.

Write a filter rule like this:

If the e-mail is NOT from someone in my
address book, put it in the _Unknown
folder. (the leading underscore makes the
folder sort near the top of all your folders).

Once a day, look at the _Unknown folder’s content. At first, there will be e-mail from people whose e-mail you want - just add their address to the address book. Over time, the overwhelming amount of stuff in _Unknown will be junk so you can just press Ctrl-A to
select all if it and then hit Del to get rid of it.

This is not a perfect strategy, but it is at least as good as the spam scoring stuff out there
because, even with scoring, you still have to look at what the system thinks is spam to make sure nothing important was marked that way. This method is fast, simple, and works really well to about the 90th+ percentile.