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Simple way to cut down on spam: create a custom spam filter

Unless the only person you e-mail is yourself (not that there’s anything wrong with that), spam probably creeps into your e-mail account. Sure, most e-mail providers, such as Gmail, do a pretty good job of keeping it out of your inbox, but no system is perfect. And, I confess, I’m OCD enough about my e-mail that if there are unread messages in my spam folder it will drive me nuts until I take care of them.

I decided to help Gmail with its spam filtering by creating a custom spam filter of my own. It’s easy to do (you don’t need any technical or programming skills) and I don’t think I’ve had any spam make it to my inbox since I started using it. While I’m an avid Gmail user (and according to a recent survey of readers, the majority of you are as well), I believe a similar idea could work for other e-mail services too.

Here’s what you do:

1. Near the search box in your Gmail account, click “Create a filter.”

2. In the box that says, “Has the words” type every bad word you know, and every common word you’ve seen in the subject line of spam, as well as their common misspellings, separated by “OR”.

For example, “Viagra OR V1agra OR Viaggra OR V1aggra OR Rolex OR Rollex OR Rolexx OR sexxy” (without the quotation marks).

I didn’t put the cuss or sexually explicit words and their misspellings for obvious reasons, but I do have them in my filter. You may blush while typing them in, but it sure beats seeing them show up in your inbox repeatedly.

3. Note that I included the proper spellings of Viagra and Rolex. If I ever decide to order either of those projects, something has either gone terribly wrong or wonderfully right in my life and I’ll have to tweak my filter. So be it. Until that time, I don’t expect anyone reputable is going to correspond with me about either of those things so I don’t worry about it.

4. Click the Test Search button.

5. All the e-mail in your account that falls under the filter you just set up will be shown, along with options as to what you want to do with it. At this point you can determine how harsh you want to be. I have no mercy. I check Skip Inbox, Mark as Read, Delete it, Kill it and Burn the Corpse.

6. You can apply your filter to the e-mail that you’ve already received, or you can leave the “Also apply filter…” option unchecked to only apply it to the e-mail you receive from that point on.

And that’s it. You never have to worry about looking at e-mail with that sort of content again. In the long run, this will save you time and help your inbox stay more organized.

Any other tips about fighting spam? Please leave word in the comments.

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Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Efficiency, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.