After a light Q&A section, Dave demonstrated how to set up some popular e-mail programs to help filter out "spam" (i.e., unwanted anonymous junk) e-mail.

The basic concept, according to Dave, is that spam arrives in your e-mail account even though the "To:" field doesn’t have your e-mail address in it (this is accomplished by technical tricks available to the senders of the spam). But since the e-mail doesn’t have your address, you can recognize that it’s not legitimate e-mail: it’s junk. Some e-mail programs can be set up to check the addressing details of the e-mail that you receive, and file it in various different "mailboxes." And that means that you can set up the e-mail program to automatically put spam into a "junk" mailbox, so that you can ignore it; it doesn’t get into your usual "In" mailbox.

For example, Dave showed us how to set up Eudora to "filter out" spam. Complete details can be found online at: http://www.eudora.com/techsupport/tutorials/win_filters.html

I’ll just give you the basic steps that Dave showed us.

First, set up a new mailbox named "spam" (or choose your own descriptive name for it!). This is where the junk e-mail will end up.

Next, use Eudora’s "Tools, Filters" menu to create a new filter. If you have more than one filter, the new one should be the very first filter, at the top of the list of filters.

Now set up the new filter’s "Match" section so that it checks the Header named "To:" in each "Incoming" e-mail that you receive. If the "To:" header "is not" your real e-mail address, then the "Action" section should "Transfer to" the mailbox that you named "spam" (or whatever you named it).

The rest of the "Match" section should "ignore" other parts of the header.

So, this filter will send any mail into the spam mailbox if it is not correctly addressed to you. You can leave the e-mail there to check it and delete it yourself at your convenience. Very handy if you receive that kind of junk e-mail!

Any e-mail that DOES have your real name in the "To:" field will pass through the remaining filters, if you have any; the surviving e-mail will end up in your normal "In" mailbox.

Obviously, you could create other filters that checked the "From:" fields of your incoming e-mail and sent the e-mail into other mailboxes. That might help you to filter out unwanted e-mail from someone who knows your actual e-mail address, for example. The idea is to have a chain of filters that sort out your e-mail; whatever is left after the sorting shows up in the "In" mailbox.

All of the e-mail is still on your PC, of course; so in a sense, it is still clogging up your PC. Some Internet Service Providers try to filter out e-mail that they recognize is coming from spam e-mailers; that keeps it from ever showing up on your PC. Check with your own ISP to learn their current policy.

Time and technical difficulties prevented Dave from showing us how to set up Microsoft Outlook to filter spam, but it should be possible.

Safer Usenet Postings
We also learned another quick trick that is useful if you ever send out messages to "Usenet newsgroups." Newsgroups are a way to read messages that people have "posted" on the Internet about specific topics; for example, flower arranging or model airplanes. There are many "newsgroup reader" programs for reading the posted messages.

If you ever want to post something to a newsgroup yourself, you do it by sending e-mail to a specific address. Then anybody on the Internet can read your posting.

Of course, your e-mail return address also shows up on your posting, since it was sent along with your e-mail. And that means that various automatic scanning programs can "harvest" your return e-mail address. They sell it to spam e-mailers, and you start receiving spam to your real e-mail address!

The solution is simple: When you e-mail something to a Usenet newsgroup, temporarily change the "Return Address" that your e-mail program puts in your e-mail. (In Eudora, you change the Return Address in the "Tools, Options, Personal Info" menu.)

For example, if your real return address is:
reallyme@reallythere.somewhere, then you might temporarily change it to:
notreallyme@notreallythere.notsomewhere. Then, in the message that you post to the newsgroup, explain to your readers that, if they want to reply to you directly by e-mail, they should just take out the "not" parts of the return address. Real humans can understand that and correct the address before they send e-mail to you there, but the automatic harvester programs cannot, and so they won’t have your real return address. Simple, yet worthwhile protection!

A Useful Reference
I recently ran into an interesting document that might help you understand your Windows 95 software. It’s a list of most of the files that Windows 95 installs on your system—more than 2000 of them, along with very short descriptions of what each file is for. So, for example, if you see a Windows 95 error message that reports problems in the AM1500T.VXD file, then you can at least learn that that particular file is a driver for a network adapter; that might help you figure out a solution to the problems.

Our Next Meeting
Our March meeting will be held as usual on the fourth Wednesday of the month, 7:00 p.m. at the Davis branch of the Yolo County Public Library. Come on down and enjoy another useful and friendly meeting!