time management Martin Lee on 18 Dec 2006 11:46 pm
Save Time by Managing Your Spam
Whether in business or personal life, time management is very important. And one thing that most of us waste time on every day is on checking and reading emails.
Every day, I get hundreds of emails and out of these, more than 80% of these emails are spam. God knows the frustration and amount of time I waste on managing the spam.
I’m sure you face a similar problem and if you add up the productive hours that you waste on them, it can be very costly indeed.
Previously, I was using a paid service called SpamCop. What SpamCop does is that it employs very aggressive filter techniques to your email inbox and only delivers the the “good” emails to you.
Filtered emails will still be kept for some time so you can manually login to the system to retrieve them should the need arises.
SpamCop pretty much does the job required but one thing I didn’t like about it was that the filtering was a bit over aggressive. Often, I had to login to the system to search through all the spam to find some of my “good” emails.
Furthermore, some automated emails that I was expecting could not even be found in the filtered emails. For some reason, they are lost.
Just yesterday, I signed up with another service called Spam Arrest. What it does is that it will send an verification email to the sender of the email the first time it receives the email.
Only after the sender complete the verification will you receive the email.
This verification needs to be done only once and all future emails will be delivered. You can also manually add email addresses, entire domain names or newsletter lists to the “approved senders” list so they do not even need to do any verification.
One problem that could arise is that some people might miss the verification email or do not complete the verification process. Some email service providers might even filter off the verification email!
For such cases, you can login to the system to search for their emails and manually add them to your “approved senders”. The system will keep all unverified emails for seven days so you might need to check this at least once a week.
This process will not take very long as you can choose to search through only the emails where the verification email gets delivered. Most spammers will use a fake email address and thus will not even get the verification email.
Compared to SpamCop where I had to search through hundreds of filtered emails including all the spam, Spam Arrest leads to significant time savings for me.
The last point about Spam Arrest is that it allows you to retrieve your emails from five different pop email boxes. This should be sufficient for most users. For those who require more, they have add-on packages and enterprise solutions available.
If you are wasting precious time and energy every day on spam, I strongly recommend Spam Arrest as a cost and time efficient way of managing all your spam.
Just an extra tip. As the verification email will come from [email protected], try to choose a username that resembles your own name. This will reduce the likelihood that people miss your verification email.
