Tech Talk: EMail Rules

By Dave Rutledge

    In the last Tech Talk I discussed the use of downloading your email to your computer with a program through POP3 or other abilities. The most popular of these programs to download your email are usually Microsoft Outlook, and Outlook Express. These programs however start to raise concerns of keeping unsolicited email (spam) on your hard disk, which can be accessed by an accidental click. When this happens you could be invisibly replying to the message to confirm your email is a live address that then gives the green light to spam your inbox, or opening a host of virus and other problems.

These tips are relevant for most all Outlook Express and Outlook, although they are made for Outlook Express 6 and Outlook 2000 – 2002.

Outlook and Outlook Express allow for the creation of rules to a message to help combat problems like this and streamline your email process. A rule for an email program is simply a command the program will execute upon receiving messages. To access the Rules wizard in Outlook Express go to Tools / Message Rules and choose to make a rule for Mail Messages, News Items, or you can alter your blocked senders list. To access the Rules wizard in Outlook go to Tools / Rules Wizard and make a new rule.

An application for rules is to streamline your email processing time by sending emails to their relevant folders. For instance if you always get bills sent to your email, you can have the bills sent to folders based off of their respective companies as soon as you connect to the mail server. The bills would then be sent to their respective folders instead of directly to your inbox where you have to go through and organize them.

Unsolicited mail, or spam, can also be combated through the method of rules. When making a rule you can allow for the rule to delete email based off of keywords in their subject line. For instance if you keep getting a lot of unsolicited email with “jokes” or “prescriptions” as a word in the subject line, you can make a rule that will delete the email upon receipt, and also delete it from the server. This is also useful if your mail service provider has a spam filter that tags the subject line. If the spam filter tags the message and replaces the subject line with the word “spam” then you can make a rule to delete all messages that are tagged “spam”. Alternatively you can allow for mail from known safe users with rules based keywords in the subject line to come through by making a rule exception. By making an exception to the rule you can allow mail with banned subject lines to come through, such as “prescriptions” from someone like your Doctor, but block all the mail with the keyword from everyone else.

Some tips for smooth rules operation are:

• Avoid multiple rules operations: If you are running rules on your messages and don’t want any rules to execute after a specific rule, select the action “stop processing more rules” before the rule(s) that you would like to exclude.
• Avoid spelling mistakes: If you are trying to block or organize messages that have the subject keyword “prescriptions” and you have accidentally incorrectly spelt it “perscriptions” then the rule will not work as intended. To avoid this make a rule based off of a specific message, and then all other like messages will have the same rule applied.
• Avoid duplicate and redundant entries: The more rules you make the longer the time it takes the program to process them all. Clicking on a rule and using the “Modify” button can avoid this. For example if you are deleting messages based off of keywords, and you have a new keyword to block, instead of making another rule to block the keyword simply modify the existing rule to include the new keyword.

Rules creation is of course not a “silver bullet” that will get rid of all of your spam and organizational problems, however rules are a good tool of helping combat spam and quick organization in time sensitive situations. Learning to use and create rules is a good tool to better make use of your time when dealing with the typical email situations in home or office computer use.

David Rutledge is the Owner / Manager of Dreamlab Digital Design Studio. Visit their website at http://www.dreamlabdigital.com  or call (250) 961 - 0932

Email | Print | Facebook | Twitter | Digg | Del.icio.us