E-Mail Washing
With all the scares around at the moment because of recent virus attacks and the proliferation of unwanted or ‘spam’ e-mail, many people are asking what can be done to protect their systems and allow them to only receive the e-mail that they want.
Well, there are some good products around that allow you to ‘Wash” your e-mail.
The first and most important benefit of mail washing is that it happens BEFORE the e-mail gets to your PC.
Your Internet Service Provider keeps your mail on a mail server, normally when you check your mail you perform a ‘send and receive’ and your e-mail application downloads all the mail that is waiting on the ISP mail server, to your PC. When the mail is downloaded you get to sort through it and delete the stuff you don’t want.
A mail washer allows you to access your mail on the ISPs e-mail server and deal with your mail BEFORE downloading it to your PC.
You can set up the washer to view as many accounts that you want (providing you have the IDs and passwords).
You can view all the subjects and a few lines of text for each mail.
You can delete anything you do not want. You can mark the mail to be blacklisted and or bounced back where it came from. A bounce back makes it looks like you do not exist and the blacklist will prevent you from receiving mail from that source in the future.
As you blacklist e-mail senders the system keeps the list and marks them for deleting or automatic delete.
You may use wildcards to block all or part of the senders e-mail address, for instance a blacklist entry of *@hotmail* would block all e-mail sent to you from hotmail accounts. The wildcards need to be used carefully so that you do not block mail that you really want to receive.
Do you ever get troublesome e-mails that have very large attachments and block up your system? This can often be a real problem for people with dial up internet connections. If someone sends them a large picture or document it can appear as if the mail system has stopped working.
An added bonus with an e-mail washer is that you can view the size of your e-mails and delete any troublesome ones at the ISP mail server end and therefore stop them from blocking the download of the mail you are waiting for.
Just one other important point to remember on e-mail, make sure you do not use up all of your space on your ISPs mail server. Ensure your e-mail program is NOT set to “leave a copy of messages on the server”
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