Spam and You

These days, the amount of spam clogging up the intertnet has reached epedemic proportions. The troublesome effects of Spam can range anywhere from an annoyance to being dangerously deceitful. This has brought about many different technologies that intercept your emails and make a determination as to whether you should see it or not.

However, these technologies are far from perfect. They need your guidance to be a successful tool against spam while delivering legitimate email to the correct folder.

Taking control of your spam filters

If you decide to employ some kind of Spam filtering, it's important that emails flagged as spam be placed into a Junk folder and not just deleted by your email provider.

Most email providers allow you to change the settings that deal with the detection of spam. It's important to have these settings set at the correct level - else you could be missing out on a lot of legitimate emails and not even know it.

It's also important to let the filters know when they've placed legitimate email in the Spam folder. All email providers let you mark an email as "Not Spam". Be sure and use this option. If you don't, the filters will never know they're wrong.

Naming names

There are some email providers that are completely overzealous in thier quest for bring you spam-free email accounts.

• Hotmail, MSN & Live.com - known to reject many legitimate emails.
• Yahoo! Email - Known to put many legitimate emails into Junk folders.
• Gmail - Decent spam filters with few false positives and a few false negatives

Conclusion

If you aren't getting any responses from me, check the Junk folder every now and again. You could be missing out on an email from your mother in-law. Even worse, your BeadTool Registration Information that was sent 3 days ago ;-)