Email Message Filters
By Wayne Maruna
A
couple of Christmases ago I decided to get cute and send my son’s
family a bunch of gag gifts from the What On Earth catalog. The
stuff was actually pretty amusing, at least in my twisted view,
especially the glittery pickle and golden perogi Christmas
ornaments. And then there was the rubber horse head mask, which
still shows up from time to time in family videos. Imagine waking
up and opening your eyes to find that staring at you. Shades of
The Godfather!
So that went
OK, at least until the follow-up ads starting hammering my email
inbox. Every week, or every day depending on the proximity of the
latest holiday. Of course I clicked on the ‘Unsubscribe’ link at
the bottom of the email, but all that did was wave raw meat in front of
their marketing dog, assuring him of the validity of my email
address. I eventually set a filter in my Microsoft Outlook
email program to send What on Earth email directly to my Junk Mail
folder, but it still irritated me no end to see their name when I would
clean out the junk mail box.
Same thing with
Buydig.com. I don’t even recall what I bought from them –
something in the electronics or computer arena I feel sure – but since
then they too have been gum on my digital shoe. I’m not sure
where they are located, but wherever it is, apparently ‘unsubscribe’
means ‘send me more’. They too go directly to my junk mail folder, and
I curse them every time I empty the folder and see their name in
passing.
Most email programs have the ability
to filter your email, either flagging it as junk or sending it directly
to the junk folder. I’ve installed Mozilla Thunderbird on a few
client machines lately after they moved to Windows 10. T-Bird can
put an orange teardrop on each suspected junk email, giving you a
chance to review it before deleting it. Or you can just click on
Tools and choose to process junk mail, which takes the flagged items
and moves them to the junk folder, which you can then empty with a
couple of mouse clicks.
But What On
Earth and Buydig deserved harsher treatment. I wanted to
cut them off at the mail server so they would never see the light of my
monitor.
I have several email addresses, but
only two in active use: one with Suddenlink, my ISP, and one with
Gmail. In fact, email addresses ending in Suddenlink.net or
Gmail.com make up 55% of all Tabmail email addresses, with Yahoo coming
in a distant third and AOL fourth. (Do people really still use
AOL??? One in twelve Tabmail survey respondents says Yes! Sigh.)
So I finally found the secret to cutting the irritating email
senders off at the pass. For those with Gmail or Suddenlink accounts,
here’s what you do.
Suddenlink: You
have to go to their webmail site. Go to
http://home.suddenlink.net and sign in. Usually you enter your
email address without the @suddenlink.net, and key in your
password. When you get back to the standard website, click on
Email. Once there, click on the Settings tab, and within that,
click on the Message Filters option. You should see ‘New Filter’
underlined. Click that. You can provide a name for the
filter, such as BuyDig. Pre-checked are the options for ‘From’
and ‘Contains’. Next to that, put the exact email address that
appears in the ‘From’ section of the email you want to suppress.
In my example, I entered Buydig.com, so that the filter read ‘If From
Contains Buydig.com’. Then I select the action to take. I
put a checkmark next to Discard Message. Then I click OK, and I can see
the new filter in my filter list. Unfortunately, you have to do this
for each offending varmint who regularly comes calling at your inbox,
but in the case of Buydig, it was worth it. I believe Suddenlink limits
you to twenty such filters.
Gmail: Open
Google Chrome and then go to Gmail. Once in Gmail, look for the
Settings gear in the upper right corner and click it. Right in
the center top of that window, look for ‘Filters and Blocked Addresses’
in blue font and click it. In the next window, click on ‘Create a
New Filter’. In the From box, type or copy in the exact email address
of the offending email sender. Then click on ‘Create Filter with
this search.’ In the next window, put a check mark next to
‘Delete It’ and click on ‘Create Filter’. And vengeance, my
friend, will be yours.
OK, I admit, I still
have an AOL email address, left over from when my computer had training
wheels. Handling junk mail there is easy. Open email.
Highlight everything. Click the Spam button. Done.
And so am I for this month. Remember, all computer-related
Taberna Tribune articles I’ve written since 2004 can be found at 
http://pages.suddenlink.net/wamaruna/tribune.html