When I began my anti spam crusade, I had assumed that most people online could competently do things such as set up a spam filter in Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. It turns out this is not so, the fear of making adjustment to the default settings getting the better of quite a majority of the population, or else just never having the time or inclination to get in and figure it out.
Luckily it is quite an easy process, and even the most computer-ese challenged amongst us can get it done easily once we understand how to it works. In this little how-to I am going to give an example how to set up a filter using Outlook Express, purely on the basis that this is the program open on my desktop as I type this.
There are two parts to a filter - a condition, and an action. The condition defines the set of circumstances that will trigger the action. The action is of course what happens when the circumstances described in the condition are true.
The example I will use here is to delete messages with [SPAM] in the title. My ISP once went through a rather silly phase of not deleting spam - but marking it in the header and leaving the deletions to us. It seems they too had made an assumption that all their customers could set up a filter to handle the hundreds of [SPAM] marked messages they suddenly started receiving. They were quickly put right but overloaded switchboards.
So we are going to create a simple filter in Outlook Express that deletes everything with [SPAM] in the title.
Step 1: Click on the menu Item Tools. Point at Message Rules and select(click on) mail... A small new window will open with the heading Message Rules and three tabs. The Mail... tab will be selected.
Step 2: Click on the New... button. Another new window opens with the titlebar New Mail Rule. There are 4 boxes to fill in.
Step 3: In the first white box Click in the square beside "Where the Subject line contains specific word". A tick will appear in the box. You will notice the 3rd box gets some more writing in it, we will deal with that soon.
Step 4: In the second white box click in the square next to Delete It. A tick will appear in the box. The text in the third white box will now read: Apply this rule after the message arrives, Where the Subject line contains specific words, Delete it. The words 'contains specific words will be blue and underlined.
Step 5: In the third white box click on the blue underlined words 'contains specific words'. A new window will open with the title bar Type Specific Words.
Step 6: In the first box in this window type [SPAM]. Click Add. Click Okay. You will be returned to the previous window. The third box will now contain the text: Apply this rule after the message arrives Where the Subject line contains '[SPAM]' Delete it
Step 7: In the fourth Box type a userfriendly name for your spam filter. I use "Delete [SPAM] rule". Click the OK button. After clicking okay you are taken back to the message rules window. Click OK here and your filter is added. Well Done.
As far as I am aware there is no limit to the number of filters you can apply. The important thing to remember is that the filter doesn't discriminate. If the result returns true then the action (Deleting in this case) will be applied.
Happy filtering.
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