n the past few years, the Internet has developed in a rapid pace and almost half of the population of the Earth has an email account. The email is one of the cheapest and quickest ways in which you are able to send and receive messages, regardless of the place you are in. This service enables you to talk to your friends, family or colleagues at a lower price that you had to pay if you were using the cellphone. The only thing that you need in order to be able to use the email is an Internet connection.
A very annoying glitch of the system is represented by the apparition of spam, which are unwanted emails from advertisers that are sent indiscriminately. Nowadays, it got to the point where your spam filter slips some spam emails into your inbox because it is not clever enough. Furthermore, another problem may appear: what happens when the spam filter does the mistake of trashing messages from your acquaintances and sends them right in the spam bin? Well, lots of ignored contacts and an almost filled inbox, we might say.
In the first case, you can simply delete the spam message from the inbox or create a filter for that domain that sent it, but in the other case? It is not so easy to check dozens of spam emails that are received every day.
Protect Important Emails and keep them out of Spam
Today, you will learn how to tweak the settings of any email address and even use a couple of applications that manage email accounts so that you will not lose any important notification to the spam folder. This is a small step by step tutorial for the most well-known emailing services, Google and Yahoo, and can be applied to most intelligent browsers out there.
Yahoo
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A small trick which every Yahoo! Mail user can enjoy is to create a simple filtering rule. With this rule, people have the possibility of marking certain messages as important or send them directly to SPAM.
- Log into your account and click on the “Settings” button and then on “Mail Options”.
- Go to the “Filters” category that is placed on the left side of the page and press the “Create or edit filters” link.
- Choose a name for the filter and then the criteria desired. You can choose to filter messages by “Sender”, “Recipient”, “Subject” and “Body”. When you finish you will have to save it.
- After selecting on which bases an email should be filtered, choose what happens when a message is detected by the filter. You have the option of automatically moving that messages inside the Inbox, Spam, Trash or a new folder at all.
Gmail
The same tactic may also be applied on Google Mail, where we are going to create a filter for multiple purposes. This is just to make sure we do receive email from a specific contact, because Gmail already comes with an almost bullet-proof system of categorizing messages. This system learns what kind of emails are important for the user and which one should be ignored. Well, if you’re having troubles with that, here’s what you can do:
- Navigate to Google Mail and click on the “Gear Icon” button. The button is placed on the top-right side of the page.
- Further select “Settings” from the drop down menu.
- Choose “Filters” and then “Create a new filter”. This is the most important step you will have to make. In the field “From” you have to put the friend’s email address. If you do not know it, it is not a problem, because Gmail has thought at this too. You can put his name or even his nickname. You can also enter multiple addresses, but only if they are separated by the word “OR” or by the sign “|”.
- After you managed to add all you addresses you will press on the “Create filter with this Search” button. After that pop-up menu will appear, where you can choose a lot of options like: “Mark as read”, “Star it”, “Forward it” and lastly, the one that interests us: “Never send it to Spam”. After that press “Create filter” and that is it. You can be sure from now that the emails are not sent to the spam folder.
For those that are using special applications for checking and sending emails, like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, these are some things you need to know.
Microsoft Outlook
Developed by Microsoft, Outlook can be used online or locally, through the Microsoft Office suite. This application is very handy because it is realized like a Microsoft Word document, so it is very easy to use it. Even filtering.
You will only have to right-click on the email in question and select the “Junk” option. A menu will pop up and you will have to choose “Never Block Sender” or “Never Block Sender’s Domain”. After following these quick actions, Outlook will treat the sender or the domain kingly, by making sure it will never end up in Spam without user approval.
Of course the system isn’t flawless, but you are able to create your own filters to improve general experience. To do this, simply browse to “Rules and Alerts” from the “Tools” menu and define the rule by selecting specific addresses, domains and so on. Outlook also gives users a couple of interesting options, like selecting when to check messages with pre-defined filters (at departure or when the arrive) and, in which folders should detected messages be sent.
Mozilla Thunderbird
Free to use, the main advantage of Mozilla Thunderbird, an email client in essence, is that you can manage multiple emails and news feed accounts on the same interface. This is very useful and you can also add a lot of plugins to a program that can actually be used even as a browser. But, let’s return to our problem.
The filtering problem exists here, too. To create a filter in Thunderbird, you need to open a message and click on the sender’s name or email address. After that choose from the newly appeared menu “Create filter from” and select your desired rule, action. You can redirect the message to your favorite folder and choose as a filter even the date of the emails.
In my opinion, Mozilla Thunderbird is the best option you have. I use it and it is very fast. The big advantage is that I can manage my email accounts, the one from Yahoo and the one from Gmail, at the same time, and from the same interface.
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