Spam 2.0

According to a New York Times article, Spam is on a come back. How do people really profit off of spam e-mail anyway? I've always wondered. Well, that's for another time.

I started noticing a few months ago that I was getting a really large number of messages that were not being picked up by my spam filter. I'd cycle through them, marking them as junk, but it didn't seem to matter. They were still getting put in my Inbox.

Then I came up with a way to virtually eliminate them from my Inbox, sending them where they belong - to the Junk Mail folder. Today, I share that method with you.

The method works well for a few reasons. First, I am using an Apple computer, running Tiger (OS 10.4). You may have a way to do what I am about to show if you are on some other machine or operating system, but I'll be going through the Apple way.

The second reason the method works for me is that I keep a very good address book that is integrated with my e-mail program. Apple makes it easy by calling these programs "Address Book" and "Mail" but most e-mail programs integrate the two (Entourage, for example). Keeping a good address book allows you to really keep spam low, because e-mail sent from someone in your address book is e-mail you know.

Apple already has a great junk filter that learns what is junk by what messages you mark as junk. It's a process that in the beginning can seem tedious (going through every e-mail to find junk messages and marking them as such), but it quickly gets easier. What surprised me was that Apple's junk filter was not learning that some e-mails I was marking as junk, were in fact junk... because they kept arriving in my Inbox.

So I took a look at the e-mails and I noticed a pattern. Most of them were not text e-mails. They were e-mails with embedded images, made to look like text. A lot of junk mail filters will learn to look at the text of e-mails for irregular grammar, but these e-mails had no text... well, at least no text that the computer could see because the text was part of an image.

The junk filter was also not picking up on any pattern of the sender's e-mail address, because these messages were coming from everywhere. Judy and Elsa and Warren... the names and e-mails were all unique and never duplicated. However, they do share one thing in common. They weren't in my address book!

So, in Apple's Mail program there is a wonderful section called "Rules" (Go to Mail > Preferences > Rules). In Rules you can set up processes that automate things you want to happen in your e-mail. For example, I have my fiancé's e-mail always show up with a purple color highlighting it in the list. This allows me to easily see if I have a message from her.

Awww, too cute? Okay, well using Rules is also how I get most of this new junk mail moved to my junk mail folder as well. Rules uses a series of conditions, and the way I have it set up it looks like this:


Let's go through some of these conditions:

1 - Make sure you set the action to respond only if ALL of the conditions are met. Otherwise it might send a lot of your regular, good e-mail to your Junk mail folder.

2 - We are looking for messages that use image attachments of the file type .GIF This is a standard image file type. Many of you might say that you don't want to do this, because then when people send you pictures they'll get put in your Junk Mail folder. Well, most pictures are saved as JPEGs or .JPG files (as they should for pictures) and that is why we have set the condition to look for senders in your address book and previous recipient lists. Same goes for people who have signatures with their e-mail that use a .GIF image. If you are getting e-mail from these folks, they should be in either your previous recipient list or your address book. If not, put them there and you'll be fine.

3 - I have the rule set to move (not copy) the message to my Junk Mail folder and also flag it. You don't need to flag it, but I did so that I could see how many of these Junk mail messages I was actually catching. It turns out that they make up 48% of my Junk Mail folder!

So, yes it was really helpful to set up this new Rule or filter to manage the new wave of spam. Hopefully it can be helpful to you as well.