Blocking Spam

Blocking Spam with Message Rules

Blocking Spam with Message Rules is one of the most effective ways of cutting down on the amount of junk that appears in your email box. When you Block Spam using Message Rules, you are essentially attempting to identify email messages that you do want rather than email messages that you do not want.

Each email program has a similar way of "organizing" your email messages as they come into your inbox based on the From: email address, the To: address, the content of the subject line and the content of the body of the message. Blocking Spam with Message Rules, or Filters as some programs call them, is incredibly effective when done right. There are countless ways to organize your Message Rules. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate one way of using Message Rules, in this example using Outlook Express.

Step 1: Right click on "Local Folders" and click on "New Folder":

Step 2: Make sure that "Local Folders" is selected and then type in a name to identify your new folder:

Step 3: Click on "Tools" > "Message Rules" > "Mail" as pictured below:

Step 4: Check the box that says "Where the To line contains people" > Check the box that says "Move it to the specified folder" > Then click on the blue link that says "contains people" as shown below:

Step 5: Type in your email address and click on "Add" then click "Ok":

Step 6: Click on the blue link that says "specified" from the image on Step 4. In the new window that appears, click on the new folder that you created in Step 2 and Click on "Ok":

Step 7: Finally, you may type in a name for the new rule that you have just created under "Name of the rule" from the image from Step 4 and then click on "Ok".

Congratulations! You have just created your first message rule. Essentially, What this rule will do is put all messages that are addressed to your email address into your new folder that you created from Step 2. A large percentage of spam that you receive actually is not addressed to you and will end up in your Inbox instead of the new folder that you created. You will still need to check your Inbox occasionally to make sure that there are not any valid email messages that have ended up there, but you have just taken a huge stop towards blocking spam! You can create more rules based on all sorts of criteria that are beyond the scope of this tutorial.