One of the most useful features of our computers, at least if we connect to the Internet, is email. We can email our friends, we can email in our business activities, and we can receive emails for personal and business purposes.
However, the bane of email — the thing that takes some of the fun out of email for many of us, and causes a lot of problems to our Internet Service Providers, is spam — unsolicited commercial email, usually advertising.
As a result of spam, ISPs have instituted a large number of controls to try to reduce the load on their email servers. They also want to prevent spam from being sent through their servers, whether by their clients or by others who figure out how to access their mail servers.
The cable company that provides my home Internet service (cox.net) has set up its own "Spam Blocker" filter to handle incoming emails.
At first, they set up a spam folder for every user, accessable only through their webmail service. Anything they thought was spam was filtered into this folder.
Fortunately, enough people complained about this solution that they gave us some options.
Cox allows us to pick our own options for its Spam Blocker, to set the action for it to take if it thinks something is spam. These settings are available via www.cox.net as follows:
- select Internet Tools, then log in with username and password
- select Spam Blocker
- select Change Spam Blocker Settings
The options are:
a. Delete incoming junk email automatically. This setting will remove junk email before it reaches your inbox.
b, Deliver junk email to the WebMail Spam folder for later review. Messages in the Spam folder will be automatically deleted 21 days after receipt. The Spam folder will be automatically created the first time suspected junk email is received.
c. Tag junk email with — Spam — in the subject line and deliver to your inbox.
I strongly suggest “Tag junk email with — Spam –. Read why:
http://www.terryscomputertips.com/computers/spam-filter/
Then, use the Rules or Filters of your email program to identify the labelled incoming emails and route them into a folder you create for them.
Of course, Hormel would probably suggest against this, as “Spam” is their trademark for their product. They allow the use of the term “spam” (not capitalized) without complaining. Shame on Cox!
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