In these times of spam (unsolicited e-mail) and large digital photos, managing e-mail can be a real headache. Here are a few tips to help get it all under control. Best of all, they won’t cost you a cent.

Spam

Internet service providers (ISPs) sometimes offer a spam-filtering feature which gets much of your unwanted e-mail but often incorrectly identifies valid messages as spam and vice versa. As the saying goes, “One man’s food is another’s poison”. No where is this truer than in spam e-mail. Here’s a better way (these screenshots show the Microsoft Entourage e-mail program, however most e-mail programs will have similar options):

1. Create a new folder in your e-mail program (where you see your Inbox, Outbox, etc.) and name it something like “Probably Spam”:

2. Just about all e-mail programs allow you to create “rules” to automatically manage received messages (in Entourage you’ll find this in the Tools menu). Create a rule that simply does one thing: if the sender’s e-mail address is not in your address book, move the message to the “Probably Spam” folder:

Whenever you check for new mail, any messages from persons who are not in your address book will now automatically be placed in your “Probably Spam” folder, allowing only messages from your known contacts into your Inbox for your immediate attention.

3. Once you’ve read your legitimate mail in your Inbox, click on the “Probably Spam” folder to display its contents. You should always keep this folder sorted by Subject (click on the Subject heading; clicking a second time reverses the sort order in most programs). Once sorted by Subject, its very easy to scan through the messages and identify any valid ones amongst the spam:

For each message you find which you want to keep, you can choose whether to add the sender to your address book (in Entourage, click once on the message and select “Add to Address Book” from the Tools menu or simply press Cmd-=) then move the message to your Inbox.

Once you’ve moved any valid messages to your Inbox, select all the messages in the “Probably Spam” folder and delete them (in Entourage, click on the trash can in the toolbar or simply press the Delete key on your keyboard). Remember, you usually have to empty the trash to permanently get rid of deleted messages. You can now ask your ISP to stop adding that annoying “***** SPAM *****” lettering to the subject line of your messages so that you can easier identify what you, not they, consider spam.

Large Messages

Ever needed to receive an important business e-mail message but had to wait 30 minutes while aunt Jenna’s e-mail with pictures of her Mediterranean holiday were being downloaded? Well, there’s a simple way around this that doesn’t involve insulting her by asking that she avoid sending large attachments and still allows you to download her images (or discretely delete them) when you have the time:

1. Most current e-mail programs provide a place which allows you to specify the maximum size of e-mail messages that will be downloaded when you check for new mail. Any messages which exceed this size will remain in your mailbox on your ISP’s mail server until you either download them later or delete them without ever downloading them to your computer. There is also usually and option that tells the e-mail program to delete messages on the server whenever you delete them from your computer. These settings are usually specified somewhere in the e-mail account settings for each e-mail address you have, so you must edit the account settings in your e-mail program (again, Entourage options shown):

I like to use a pretty small value (30K) so that I get my mail as quickly as possible (even most virus attachments are larger than 30K).

2. From now on, depending on how your specific e-mail program implements this, every time you check your mail, the messages will be downloaded without having to be queued up behind large messages. For messages which are larger than the value you specified above (30K), you will still get enough information (sender, subject, size, whether any attachments, etc.) to decide what you want to do about them:

3. Once you’ve received a message which is larger than your set limit, you can choose what to do with it (in Entourage, by clicking on the icon highlighted above):

Full Mailboxes

Its annoying to have sent someone an important message only to find out later that it was returned to you with a cryptic reason like “couldn’t write output” or “disk quota exceeded”. What these terms mean is simply that the recipient’s mailbox is full... his e-mail program is not automatically deleting downloaded messages from his ISP’s mail server. If your program isn’t deleting messages from the mail server, you’re probably not getting all the messages being sent to you. Here’s what to do to ensure that your mailbox doesn’t overflow:

1. In your e-mail program’s account settings, be sure to select an option which tells the program to delete messages after they have been downloaded to your computer. Likewise, if there is an option for deleting messages on the server when they are deleted from your computer, be sure to select it. These options should be activated for all e-mail accounts (addresses) you have (these are the same options identified in step 1 under “Large Messages” above):

Checking Mail on Multiple Computers

Do you regularly check your mail from more than one computer? For example, you have a computer at work from which you check your e-mail and you have one at home which is also used for checking e-mail. Or you’re on a business trip or holiday and need to check mail but also want to receive the mail on your desktop computer when you return home. Isn’t it annoying to not get mail on one because the mail was already downloaded to the other? Well there’s a way around this too:

1. In your e-mail program’s account settings on each computer which you’d like to receive copies of your mail, select the option which tells the program to leave a copy of your messages on the server for a given number of days or weeks after downloading:

Mail will remain on the server for the period specified so you will still get the messages on your other computers, provided you check mail on them within that period.

These are just a few of the things which you can do to take back control of your e-mail. I hope they help.

Gordon Gonsalves, 2004
gordon@rightent.com