How To Use Spam Filters Effectively
Staying on top of all your email is hard, right?
Email allows us to exchange information quickly and efficiently, but the spammers have taken advantage of the technology to gain access to our most important resource; our time.
The good news is that we have some tools to blunt the spammers. The first tool is a spam filter provided by the company that routes email to our inbox, and the second tool is another filter built into the email software itself. While these tools are helpful, the problem is that neither of these filters is perfect.
This reality creates two potentially serious problems.
Problem Number 1: We get a ton of emails in our inbox that are clearly spam, and
Problem Number 2: We get a ton of emails that are clearly important, yet somehow end up in our spam folder.
While it is true that software cannot perfectly differentiate between your Aunt Sally and someone claiming to be your new best friend from Mali that has 10 million bucks belonging to you, we can help the software make much better guesses as to what to keep and what to discard.
How to keep spam out of your inbox folder
- Tighten spam rules at your email service provider: Most providers give you tools that are designed to filter out spam before it gets sent to your email application.
- Tighten spam rules for email tool: Whatever the tool you use to view your email (Outlook, Gmail, whatever), there is a section that allows you to tighten up the filters
- Block mean people: Mark them as a spammer, and all of their emails will go directly to the junk folder.
How to keep important emails out of your spam folder
- Add their address to your contact list: Adding someone to your contact list can help to keep their email out of the spam folder.
- Mark email that has landed in spam as “not junk”: Help your spam filter understand that the email is not junk so that the person’s email does not land in spam the next time.
- Loosen spam filter settings at email provider and email app: If you have your spam rules set too tight, you can have far too many important emails landing in the spam folder.
The key challenge is that many of the things that we do that keeps spam out of our inbox can also put important emails into our spam folder. The filters are not perfect, but they can help us get the right emails into the right folders much more often.
Need help getting you email flowing smoothy? As always, you can schedule a free consultation with me and I’ll be happy to help you get this off your plate.