Email White Listing - Dealing with Email Rationally

I don't know about you, but I get a lot of spam. It seems that the spam generators are doing a good job of defeating the spam filters - at least the ones that work on pattern matching.

There are filters that many major ISPs use that are actively and in real-time updated with information from "spam traps" - email addresses that are purposely put in places where the spammers like to go to collect them. They're put on web pages that the spammers "scrape" - and any email sent to these addresses is then known to come from a spammer, since the web pages are specifically crafted to alert any human that the address is a trap.

Be that as it may, my email does not go via my ISP for the simple reason that my ISP has shown that they filter far too heavily. Of course the other reason my email does not go via their system is that I actually run a small email service for some of my customers and friends; a system that has been running since the mid 1990s. It has spam and virus filtering on it but it is "heuristic" - pattern matching, not active trap-fed.

I also have a fairly large number of email addresses that all feed down to my main one and a couple of administrative ones, but all end up on my desktop in my in-box.

This means I use my desktop email software's rule system very heavily to filter the incoming email into various incoming boxes, leaving only those emails from people and with subjects I've never seen before in my actual "inbox" - all the rest end up in boxes for specific people or customers or companies, vendors, subjects, etc.

You might find my method useful. I certainly know many people who should have a similar system but don't.

It's really very simple.

Each time I receive an email from someone I approve of dealing with, be they politicians, friends, family, customers, vendors, or whatever, I make a folder for that category or individual and create a rule that puts the incoming email into that folder as soon as it comes into the inbox.

This means that the inbox should only ever contain spam (unsolicited commercial email) or initial contact with someone new I expect to have an ongoing email relationship with. All the rest is pre-distributed into the various folders where it would end up being dragged in any case. Each such folder displays (by convention in all the email clients I've used and seen in recent years) the fact there is new, unread email in it by being in BOLD and typically some number shows beside the title showing how many new messages the folder contains. The example beside is from Evolution, the Linux-based mail client that works a lot like Outlook.

This means I can easily decide what email to deal with and when - leaving the politicians and low-priority stuff for later, and dealing with family and customers immediately. The inbox, with its load of spam and possibly one or two new real contacts, is left for when my blood pressure is low and I need a boost :)

One more tool I use in fending off the spammers; RSS feeds instead of email list subscriptions. I've shown you (to the left) my main email list selection but what does not show is that most of these folders are no longer used much, if any, because I no longer get the list messages by email. Instead, I use the "Syndication" feed that most such list sites now use in posting their newsletters to their home web site for general distribution and indexing by the search engines. I use Thunderbird's news-feed facility to subscribe to the RSS feed for each of the lists I used to get via email. This offloads even more from my email and has the added advantage that, since it isn't in my email system, I treat the mail list stuff at a lower priority, further lowering my stress levels at trying to keep up with it all.

I hope this helps you too. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them to the comment feed here.

richard