Let's Take Five On Spam

First, the obligatory link: Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways To Deliver Itself

A quick show of hands, who doesn't hate random spam e-mail? ... Okay, I know, that was an exercise in getting people to exercise by putting up their hands. Now, if you're still using Outlook, and I'm sure many people don't anymore, let's have at filtering one of the new waves of spam the article talks about. "It's me, WHOEVER", or "Hi, it's WHOEVER". How many people really send you regular messages with such simple key words repeatedly? We can filter these out without a problem.

Go hit TOOLS on the top bar (to the right of FILE), and open Rules and Alerts. Create a new rule, select the radio button Start creating a rule from a template. In the step one area, select the option Move messages with specific words in the subject to a folder. Then, in the step two area, click on the underlined "specific words" to open an input box. Put "It's me" (without the quotation marks) into the box, and hit add. Then do the same for "Hi, it's". If you're so inclined, you can catch additional spam this way by re-intering the same values, but with its instead of it's. Once done, hit OK, and click on the underlined "specified" for the specified folder. In the Choose a folder box, select Junk E-mail, then hit OK. After that, hit Finish, and your new rules are ready to go.

Congratulations, you're now filtering one of the season's dominant spam subjects in minutes! Heh... Obviously, you can repeat the process for any other key words you notice popping up repeatedly as spam. Be careful, though, that you don't accidentally key something to automatically go to Junk that isn't. It just depends on what words appear in legitimate e-mails to you, so don't forget to account for that, or you may end up sifting back through the junk folder to find something a friend or colleague is sure they sent you.