August 2002 AppleGram - E-Mail Filters

E-Mail Filters

If you’re like me, and I’m sure you are, you probably receive along with your regular e-mails a bunch of Spurious Promotion And Merchandise (SPAM) letters each and every day. SPAM has become the very bane of all of our existences. Having to read through all that crapola. And it just keeps coming. Well here’s a few simple tricks to help cut down on all that unwanted junk.

It’s all a Numbers game
Back in the old days when we used to send stuff through the U.S. Post Office (now called ‘snail-mail’), it would cost anywhere from 34¢ for 1st-class mail down to 22¢ per ounce for ‘bulk’ mail’ to send a letter. As more and more retailer discovered the power of the mail, and wanted to send flyers, costs for the merchants escalated. Enter 4th-class mail. Low cost but low priority. Well, you can’t have everything.

Merchants soon realized that the more flyers that they sent out, the more customers purchased their products. Ultimately they found out that, as a rule of thumb, they got a 1% return on the flyers that were mailed to their customers. So the race was on. The more people that they could mail to, the more sales they could make. And where did they get the names to sent to? Why from their loyal customers, of course. “Say, Mrs. Smith, thanks for your business. Would you happen to know of anyone else who might like our products?” And so the lists grew. And grew. And grew some more. The more names, the more sales. The more sales, the more names.

Enter the List Makers
Eventually every time you purchased something, your name found it’s way on to a list. Car buyers. House buyers. Dress buyers. Appliance buyers. And the lists grew. But there still weren’t enough names. Soon your name was added to a list if you were even ‘thinking’ about purchasing an item. [‘Win a free month’s service if your name is selected’; ‘Register to win a trip for two to Las Vegas!’]. And the lists grew, again. Soon municipal names were added. So if you had a telephone. Or used gas or electricity. Or paid taxes. You were on a list. And then there were credit cards…

Soon there were companies who just edited and maintained lists. And they discovered that other companies would pay, dearly, for access to those lists. And a new industry was born - The buying and selling of your name and where you lived, and what you bought, and where you shopped, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Enter the 20th Century
This was all well and good for the merchants, but it was costing them a fortune for postal cost! Enter the Internet! Millions of address and no postage! All you needed was a computer and some software, a connection to the internet, and a computer geek and you could send millions of flyers a day.

And to be sure many merchants did. And many still do. But after a while the consumers (that’s you and me) revolted. We didn’t want all this unwanted mail clogging our mailboxes, but there was no way to stop it. Or is there?

Stopping a Stampede
The reality is, is that the people who email you stuff don’t know if the address that they bought from the list merchants are really any good. They’re hoping they are, but they don’t know for sure. If someone sends you an advertisement and you don’t respond, most likely they’ll assume that you didn’t receive it. But they’re crafty, these merchants. They might send you a dozen messages in a few hours. At the bottom of those message is a little note, ‘If you’ve received this message in error, or wish to be removed for our list, click here’. You’re instructed to enter ‘remove’ or ‘unsubscribe’ into the subject line of an e-mail and send it off. Ka-Ching! They gotcha! Now they know that they have a good e-mail address. 1st rule - Never respond to SPAM.

Filters
If someone is really annoying you with SPAM, the best way to be rid of them is to create a filter in your e-mail program. I use Eudora as well as the e-mail client in Netscape, but the method to create a filer is virtually the same in every e-mail program.

In Netscape go to the EDIT menu>Message Filters. A window opens for your ‘Incoming Mail’ or ‘Inbox’

Now say your receiving a lot of unwanted mail about 2nd mortgages, or refinancing your home, or debt consolidation etc. In that top window give you filter a name. I used ‘Refinance Stuff’. The bottom half of the window is called ‘Filter Action’. This tells the filer what to look for and what to do when it finds it.

Here’s what my filter looks like:

So in this case if the e-mail contains ‘refinance’ or ‘home owners’ in the subject line, then the filter moves the e-mail to the Trash! Never seen, never read, No fuss, no bother.

Filters can be as specific or as general as you can imagine. The trick is to be as perseverant as the merchants.