Spam, How to Deal?

Everyone gets spam today in their inboxes. Personally, I have 5 email addresses all linked to a master account. There's a lot of spam sometimes to deal with, and it can be overwhelming!

If this description fits you, there may be hope in the horizon. With some changes, you can be on your way to living the spam-free life, and even contribute to keeping future spam messages down!

Get a GMail account
GMail is one of the most popular email services in today's market. It was the first public service to come out with a rolling and ever increasing amount of free space. It has also developed lots of great tools we can use to deal with everyday mail.

One of GMail's features is that Google uses its same search engine to search your mail to see if it is spam, and marks it as so in a different folder. It sounds scary at first, but the convenience of having it automatically screened is ever valuable.

What to do with all the Spam?
You now have the tools to deal with spam, but this won't help stop it. Fortunately, the Federal Trade Commission has created Spam rules, and actually encourages people to send their spam email to them! They use this spam email to help track and identify fraudulent emails on the internet! Here's how you can report to them:

In GMail, we have to create a filter that will find our spam. After logging in, click "Create A Filter" next to the search box at the top of the screen. Where the filter says "Has the words:", enter "is:spam". You can do a test search if you'd like to see what emails would be covered by this filter. Click Next. You will be notified that the filter won't work automatically. Just hit OK.

You will want to enable Skip the Inbox, Forward it to "spam@uce.gov", and Delete it. Click Apply to Conversations Below and Update Filter.

You have now sent the spam mail in your account out for indexing, plus cleared your spam mail box! In the future, you will have to run this filter each time you want to send out a spam mail batch, but it's worth it to know that you are actually helping to fight spam, instead of just deleting it, right?