I have a confession to make… I rarely check my e-mail. Its on my list of Top Ten Things I Hate. Every time I do it, I have to spend at least twenty minutes deleting spam messages before I can actually get around to reading e-mail. I’m usually lazy and don’t delete the spam first, so I end up missing messages and the whole process is just a complete pain in the a$$.

I used to use a challenge-response e-mail filter called Sendio. It ran in Outlook and every time I received an e-mail that wasn’t in my address book, it sent a "challenge" e-mail asking the sender to prove they were an actual person and not a spammer. (Spammers never look at reply e-mails — outgoing only.)

But I had to stop using that when I moved to Vegas. It wasn’t reliable when I had computers in more than one physical location. If I had the challenge/response program running on my computer in Denver, and went to Vegas for a few weeks, the Denver computer would inevitably crash. Then the filter doesn’t work until I can return to Denver to reset the computer. Another problem is that an e-mail filter didn’t make the best impression on new contacts.

So I spent a few years using the online Yahoo interface, which works well for a web app. I don’t like web interfaces but at least I could delete a message once, and have it stay deleted when I moved to another computer. I couldn’t use POP3 because POP3 doesn’t work well across multiple computers — you have to delete all your spam once for each computer.

The final straw is that I’ve been adding e-mail accounts recently. I have the MattAbar (at) WealthFly account and a Google address. I’ll also eventually have a work e-mail. So my simple online solution is now much more complicated. I have to remember to check multiple sources and, as we’ve already established, I’m not good at keeping up on my email. So I’m back to missing e-mails, or responding to them a month late, which isn’t much better.

Last week I set out to do two things, consolidate all my email into one desktop email reader, and share that desktop reader across all my computers. When I delete an email in Vegas, I want it to be deleted in Denver too. I only know of one way to do this: IMAP.

Step 1: IMAP Access for All Accounts

IMAP lets you use a desktop browser to check multiple e-mail sources. It’s been around for many years but isn’t universally supported because it puts a huge load on your e-mail server. For example, Yahoo doesn’t support it. To "IMAP Enable" my main Yahoo account, I set myself up a new e-mail account at fastmail.fm, and made it suck all my Yahoo e-mails to the fastmail account using POP3. After that, I use fastmail as my main e-mail account and never go back to Yahoo.

The WealthFly email also goes to Yahoo; I set it up to forward all my messages into the fastmail account because Yahoo can only POP3 enable one e-mail account per user. Why don’t I forward my other Yahoo account also? Because when you forward messages, they disappear from the Yahoo account and I still want them available for historical searches and backup.

I also told fastmail.fm to grab my Gmail using POP3 because my Gmail IMAP isn’t enabled yet.

Step 2: Outlook

I set up Microsoft Outlook on each of my computers to hit Fastmail with IMAP. Everything now comes into my main inbox, but changes are immediately reflected on Fastmail’s server and reflected on any computer where I have Outlook installed.

This means:

• When I delete a message, it gets deleted on the server;
• When I move a message into a sub-folder, it moves on the server;
• When I send a message from one computer, it goes into the Sent Messages folder on the server;

When I do something on my desktop, within seconds its happened on my laptop too.

Step 3: Spam Filtering

Now that my e-mail is all coming to the same place and syncing, I still have the spam problem. In fact, I have 3x the problem that I had with my original Yahoo account because now I get 3x the spam. I have 5-10 spam e-mails for every one legitimate e-mail.

It eventually dawned on me that most of my spam was coming from web sites where I made purchases. So technically, its not spam. These guys just took it upon themselves to add me to their "technically-not-spam" blast mail list that goes out every day or two. This is much more annoying than unsolicited spam. Since I bought something from them, it feels like I’m paying them to spam me.

I spent a few hours going through the "technically-not-spam" e-mail, searching for the "unsubscribe" link in each one and figuring out how to unsubscribe from each and every e-mail list I was on. It was time consuming and doesn’t seem to work. With the first twenty lists I unsubscribed from, at least twelve are still sending me e-mails.

Time for Plan B.

Microsoft Outlook has a Rules and Alerts feature with an amazing ability to sort and organize your mail. At first, I set up individual rules for each vendor who sends me spam, but that quickly got tedious. I found it was much easier to drag all of my spam e-mails into a contact group, creating a permanent "Mailing List". Next I set up a rule that forwards all e-mails from my "Mailing List" contacts into a sub-folder called "Mailing List Spam". Archiving it is better then deleting it, in case I want to go back and find something caught by the filter.

Here’s my Mailing List rule:

…and here’s my master Rule list. I set up separate groups for more accurate archiving:

Conclusion

It seems to be working so far. My laptop and desktops sync perfectly, and the Outlook Rules that run on my desktop are instantly applied to the IMAP server and reflected everywhere on all computers. The next time I travel, I can export my rules and just run them on my laptop. I still have a couple real honest-to-goodness unsolicited spam messages each day but the Yahoo/Google spam filters do a great job keeping most of them out of my inbox.