Email Guides and Essays
by Kaitlin Duck Sherwood,
including

  • Top Ten Tips for Overcoming Email Overload
  • Top Three Anti-Spam Filters



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  • Sherwood's Top Three Spam Filters in Netscape


    These filters are for Netscape 4, but filters haven't changed that much in Netscape 6 (or even in Mozilla 1.0, for that matter).

    Whitelisting

    I repeat that it is absolutely essential that you explicitly keep all messages from people whose messages you want. In Netscape, this is a bit tedious.
    1. Open the Filters window by selecting Edit->Message Filters
    2. Click on the New button on the right.
    3. Select the radio button that says Match on any.
    4. Change the menu that says subject to sender.
    5. Type someone's email address in the box to the right of the menu that says contains.
    6. Click on the button that says More. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for all your "good" correspondents. (Hint: if you want to whitelist everybody in your company, type in your company's domain name. For example, if you work at Floss Recycling.com, type flossrecycling.com in the box from Step 4.)
    7. Close the window.

    Embedded Imges

    To find messages with embedded images:
    1. Do steps 1 and 2 from the Whitelisting filter.
    2. Change the menu that says subject to body.
    3. In the box next to contains, type IMG.
    4. Next to Move to folder, select a folder to move the message to.
    5. Close the window.
    I haven't found any word in the English language that contains "IMG" -- except for the city Primghar, Iowa. This filter will mistake any messages that mention Primghar for spam.

    No Real Name

    Unfortunately, Netscape doesn't notice spaces in filters. I thus haven't been able to figure out a way in Netscape to catch messages with no "real name".

    Tracking IDs

    Unfortunately, because Netscape doesn't recognize Spaces in filters, there is no way to make this filter in Netscape.

    These filters won't catch all spam, but they will catch a lot of it -- and they are absolutely free to set up.


    Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
    Updated 29 April 2002.