If you don't yet receive much junk e-mail then this article won't make a lot of sense to you, but if like me an increasingly large percentage of your e-mail is unsolicited junk e-mail, then you have a treat in store.
Junk e-mail (often known as "Spam" - a term which originally referred to mass postings of unsolicited advertising data to newsgroups) can include such things as press releases, get-rich-quick schemes or announcements of new web sites - including pornographic web sites - or products you have no interest in. They waste your time and your money as you have to spend time downloading them and sorting through them and deleting them just so you can get to your valid e-mail.
About two months ago the volume of junk e-mail that I was receiving here at Cybertown suddenly increased sharply to the point where one weekend I received almost 600 unsolicited e-mails! Like many people I had been becoming increasingly annoyed with having to wade through all this junk. It was literally starting to waste nearly two hours of my day.
I started a desperate search for solutions. I went on the Net and started searching under "junk" and "e-mail" and found a great many web sites springing up addressing this issue. I looked at all of these web sites but while I found much valuable information and various suggested solutions, none of these solutions were really fully satisfactory as none of them really stopped the flow of incoming junk e-mail - except on a one-at-a-time basis which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.
I realized that what I really wanted was some way to intercept the junk e-mail before it got to my computer. I figured it should be possible to create a filter program that would intercept the mail, read through it and if it was unsolicited junk, delete it before I even had to download or read it. So I started searching on the Net under "filter" and lo and behold, I started finding programs designed to do just that. I got very excited until I realized that these programs were written in Unix and were written only for running on a server. One was for Windows but it only worked with Microsoft Mail in Windows 3.1 and was very expensive and another one that worked with Windows was inexpensive but was also extremely limited. So what about those of us who don't have our own server and who use another mail program such as Eudora, for instance? Well, the new Eudora 3.0 has some basic filtering capabilities that you can use after you have already downloaded your mail but the filtering is not designed to handle junk e-mail and thus is too limited for this purpose. I was back at square one still with no solution in sight. *
By a strange quirk of fate I also happened at the time to be looking for a program that would auto-respond to valid e-mail that I was getting. A couple of days later I happened to receive a reply to one of my e-mails that was an automated reply. At the bottom it said that the reply was sent by a program called AutoSponder. I checked out the program and found it to be an excellent easy-to-use Windows program that would indeed auto-reply to selected e-mail for me. In learning the program I noticed that it contained features that looked as if they could be expanded to create a true junk e-mail filter.
I contacted the programmer, David T. Gray, whom I found to be a wonderful fellow, and discussed this possibility with him. It turned out that theoretically the program could indeed be expanded to create exactly what I was looking for. During the next 2 months David and I worked together - me asking for the impossible and David programming it. We added features, tested them, created and fixed bugs until finally the program - now called MailGuard - was stable and quite literally saving me two hours a day!
Now, before I get my e-mail, I run MailGuard and watch in awe as the program sorts through my mail (while it's still on the server), deletes particularly obnoxious e-mails and sends them a reply that says simply, "MAIL DELETED FROM SERVER UNREAD", finds e-mails that need specific kinds of replies and automatically replies to them correctly and then it sorts through the rest of the general junk e-mail, deletes them from the server and sends them an automated reply explaining to them that we don't have time to read unsolicited e-mail and suggesting how they could more effectively promote themselves without annoying people. Then it opens my mail program and downloads my valid mail. I love it!
So, is there really a solution to junk e-mail? There is now.
* Since that time many people have created anti-spam programs for Windows but none of them enable you to filter out any combination of words in the body of the e-mail message like MailGuard does. Most of them only filter by known spammer's e-mail addresses (constantly changing) or by words in the subject. Thus they're still pretty limited compared to MailGuard.
You can get a fully-functioning 30 day trial version of
for free here
