Wednesday, July 8, 2009

STOP Getting Spammed by Your Own Email Address

Over the last few weeks I have noticed that spammers have started more and more spam email from YOUR/MY email address. The email is from YOU and also to YOU. Chances are you have your email address white-listed . Here's a little trick I use to stop these emails from getting into my Inbox.

First why would you email yourself…last week I wrote a tip on how you can stay organized by emailing yourself… that could be a reason.

Here's how you can move the spam emails out of your Inbox but still keep the real emails you have emailed yourself.

Decide on a few characters that you will type in the Subject of every email that you send yourself. Keep it simple as you want to be able to type these characters from your BlackBerry etc as well. Use something like QAZ or whatever is easy for you to type.

Any time you send yourself an email type those characters in the Subject e.g. Instead of "Pick Stuff from Supermarket", you would need to type (say) "QAZ Pick Stuff From Supermarket".

Now setup Outlook.

1. Add your own email address to the Safe Senders list in Outlook (this is probably already done)

2. Create a Rule in Outlook so that all emails from your email address get moved to your Junk Mail folder, except those with your special tag in them (QAZ in the example above)

Click Tools - Rules and Alerts
Click New Rule to display the Rules Wizard

Click Move messages from someone to a folder.
Click people or distribution list. Enter all your own email addresses in the From field and click OK.
Click specified folder. Use the screen that comes up to select the Junk E-mail folder and click OK.
Click Next
Click Next

Tick except if the subject contains specific words.
Click Specific Words. Enter the tag (QAZ in example) and click Add. Click OK

Your Rules should look something like the following:

Click Finish.

Now anytime Outlook receives an email from you, it will get moved to the Junk Emails folder, EXCEPT when they have your special tag. EASY!

Does this tip work for you. Do you have other better methods. Tell me what you think by leaving a comment on the blog.

Related Links:
Fine-Tuning Spam Filtering in Outlook

7 comments:

Eric & LeeAnne said...

Simple but great idea. Thanks!

Tavis Schriefer said...

This method does work well, and by coincidence I started doing something similar a few weeks ago. I added "ZZZ" a few lines down from my signature block on my iPhone and made an outlook rule that looks in the body of the email for "ZZZ", rather than the subjet. This allows it to happen automatically and I don't have to consciously type a unique character set. This has worked great because I BCC myself on any email I send from my iPhone so there is a record of it in Outlook.

Unknown said...

Does this strategy cause problems when I copy or bcc myself on an email I send to a third party? I often bcc myself on client emails so that I can later put the email into a folder (rather than printing out).
Thanks

Sanjay Singh said...

A REFINEMENT:

Steven asked...

Does this trick cause problems if you copy or bcc yourself on an email to a third party? I often bcc myself on outgoing emails to clients so that at a later date I can pull it into a folder for filing purposes (rather than printing out). I depend on my ability to have copies of emails in my inbox for this purpose

POSSIBLE SOLUTION...
Edit your Rule and also tick the option that says "where my name is in the To box"

Unknown said...

Sanjay, what I keep getting are emails with impotence images embedded inside of them. I can't seem to disallow the image from loading. It doesn't look like they arrive as attachments so much as call/load the images from inside of Outlook. Any idea how that's done or how to prevent it?

Rick Rutledge said...

Perhaps more useful than putting the identifier tag in the header, add it to your signature(s). If the signature is in HTML, put it in white text, which will hide it from most view (other than plain text), and it will simply appear as extraneous characters when viewed. Even better, have your rule look for something predictable in your signature, such as your phone number or ZIP code.

This will help simplify your life, because you won't need to remember it. It will also help when your BCCs come from an outside source, such as a Blackberry, where you don't want to have to remember to put the tag, and you can typically append a signature automatically.

Venkatachalam said...

Simple trick but very effective in handling those spam emails.