Managing your e-mail

(CNN) -- With all due respect to AOL -- which owns CNN.com -- "You've got mail" is not necessarily a welcome announcement. Some days it seems to take hours just managing your e-mail. CNN's James Hattori talked with Dennis O'Reilly of PC World magazine to get some tools for coping with an out-of-control inbox.

Q: What's the mistake people make in trying to manage their e-mail?

O'Reilly: Keeping everything in the inbox that makes it almost impossible to find a message from, oh, two or three months ago. Make sure that you address the incoming mail as soon as it arrives -- try not to let it pile up. It's kind of hard when you're on vacation. One of the things you can do is automatically send people a message that says "I'm out of the office for a week.

Q: Auto reply?

O'Reilly: Auto reply -- and that will let them know -- don't send more messages for a week, or don't expect a response for a week. Creating folders to put messages in as soon as they arrive, or creating filters so that as the messages arrive, they'll be sent to specific folders that you've set up ahead of time.

Q: Show us how.

O'Reilly: This is in Outlook Express, a very popular e-mail client. And you select "TOOLS" then "MESSAGE RULES" then "MAIL." You'll get this dialogue box ... and we'll say we're tired of getting these messages that say how to get rich quick. So, I'll say where the subject line contains specific words ... if you have "get rich quick" in your out subject, it scans it for those words and puts it in the "possible spam" folder instead of your inbox.

Q: But what if I want to get rich quick?

O'Reilly: Something tells me you're not going to get rich quick by following the instructions on e-mail.

Tools Tip: Periodically check your spam folder for legitimate e-mails that may have been filtered out.

Q: So let's dig into spam here -- not the pork stuff that comes in a blue can -- but this is the unwanted, unsolicited mail that we all seem to get. Is there any way to completely eliminate spam?

O'Reilly: Probably not. Not until people stop trying to sell things to everybody else. If it was a bulk distribution of an e-mail, there's a program that will mimic a message as if it were an invalid e-mail address.

Q: And that's a program you download?

O'Reilly: Bouncespammail.com is software you can download from the PC World.com downloads. It's a free utility and works like a charm and you'll never hear from those people again.

Q: How do you go about making that work?

O'Reilly: Once you download it, you'll get a screen that looks similar to this, and this is what gets sent back. These are the exact fields and content that would be sent to a spammer if the address were invalid.

Q: So when they get that message bounced back, they remove your name?

O'Reilly: Right. It's a waste of time and money to send these messages to addresses they know are invalid.

Tools tip: Never reply to spam. It confirms to spammers that your e-mail account is active. This could cause you to receive even more spam than before.

Q: Sounds like a lot of work.

O'Reilly: Like a lot of other PC habits, once you do it once or twice, you fall into the habit, it becomes second nature, and you forget all about it -- it's not a task at all -- it's really helpful.

Does Congress read its e-mail?
May 2, 2001

PCWorld.com

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