Save Everything so you can Delete More

Fear of Loss

It's my position that one of the reasons that people have such a difficult time dealing with spam (and I use that in a general sense to mean any unwanted or unexpected email) is that they're afraid to take action. They're afraid to delete a questionable email, turn up the dial on their spam filter, or perhaps afraid to even install one at all.

Why?

Because they might miss something. Email, once deleted, is gone. Poof. So long. What if that high priority message with key information and data got spam-filtered? What if it got deleted?

Poof. So long.

But not if you save a copy first!

Now, I'll admit right here and now that this technique may not be available for everyone. It depends a lot on how you receive your email - your ISP, your mail host, the mail program you do, or do not, use. In future articles I'll talk about what to look for in each of those to help you manage your email better. But for now, just for now, I'm going to ignore the fact that not everyone can do this right off the bat. (But we will have ways! Later.)

Save It All, Download Only Some

So here's what I do. A legitimate email address, like say leo <at> tamingemail.com, will get automatically forwarded to two different email aliases: "leo-clean", and "leo-all". The alias "leo-all" does nothing but accumulate the mail on my mail server. Nothing. No special processing, no spam filtering, nothing.

And I don't download it. At least, not into my mail client. Or at least, not very often. I download and archive the accumulated mail about once a month, as it turns out, freeing up that space on my server.

The other alias, "leo-clean", is processed like any normal mail account. It's spam filtered on the server, and it's the account from which I actually download my email. With most of the spam removed.

Freedom!

So what does that buy me?

Well, for one thing, I never lose anything. OK, not anything, anything, but I never lose a piece of incoming email. If it makes it to my mail server, I have it and I can find it.

In technical terms, I've "covered my assets".

What this has allowed me to do is both be freer with my "Delete" key, as well as experiment with my spam filtering rules on the "leo-clean" alias and feel comfortable knowing that I won't lose anything should I trip up and blow away some legitimate email. I'm free to play things closer to the edge.

So why would I want to do that?

For all the reasons we hate spam. The less email I have to download and manually delete, the more effective, and less frustrated I can be. Rather than allowing gobs of email to land in my inbox, for fear of filtering too much, I can ratchet down the spam-filtering screws a little tighter, or hit that Del key a little quicker.

And I'll be honest; doing this has saved my ... uh ... assets a time or two already. When my wife was expecting an important email from a business associate, and they said they sent it but she says she never got it, it was that pre-filtered "archive of everything" to the rescue.

The Catch

Yes, there's a catch. It's not a perfect system.

You'll note that my wife was expecting email, and knew that it hadn't arrived. It's hard to miss something that you're not expecting. Your long-lost relative sends you an email out of the blue, and perhaps because they're telling you all about their new job on working "performance enhancing" medications - their mail gets filtered.

You have it in your pre-filtered archives, you just don't know you have it.

The fact is, false positives are an ugly side effect of any spam filtering solution. Regardless of how loose, or how tight, you turn the spam filtering screw, legitimate mail will occasionally be filtered. Even if the filter is you, doing it manually, you'll trip up too.

But the pre-filter archive means that no-mater what, you'll have the mail. When you finally find out that your rich uncle has been mailing you about your position in his will, you'll be able to go back to that archive and dig out all the details. (And hopefully return to his good graces.)

How?

OK, you're convinced, and you want to set up your own pre-filtering archive. How do you do it?

Well, for the 0.01% of you that run your own mail server like I do, you probably also already know enough about what I've described to run off and do it. Have at it.

For "real" people, it gets more complicated.

Because of the various capabilities presented by different email providers and email clients, I'm unfortunately going to stay fairly generic at this point, and only speak in concept. It'll be up to you to determine if those concepts can be applied to your software, and in your situation. As I mentioned earlier, I'll review the characteristics of a good email provider, and a good email client at a later time - and you can bet that the ability to do what I've just described will be key. But for now, I'll speak "in concept".

First, you need to be able to get at your pre-filtered email. That's key. If your email is already somehow filtered before you even have a say, you're kinda stuck. Sadly, this does include many of the large ISPs like, say, AOL, or the free email providers such as Hotmail. Those ISPs are notorious for (seemingly) arbitrarily blocking and filtering your incoming mail.

But if you can, step one is most commonly to turn off any ISP-side filtering - or at least set it to it's lowest possible setting.

Now, you'll want to somehow "split" that incoming stream of email into two. One that is somehow archived, and one that is not.

There are a couple of possible approaches.

There are definitely games one can play if your ISP supports forwarding. For example, you could automatically forward your unfiltered email to two different accounts. On one you would enable spam filtering, and on the other you would not. (Sound familiar? It's exactly what I do behind the scenes on my mail server. Will your ISP let you? You'll have to check.) Alternately if your ISP allows it, forward to one other account that is filtered, but enable some kind of "save a copy" feature. The saved copies become your archive of everything (which you may need to download occasionally if your ISP imposes a quota), and that forwarded-to account is where you now get your email.

Having the ISP or mail server do the work is the ideal, because you can then avoid downloading your unfiltered mail.

But as I said, it's not an option for everyone. So the next approach, which is somewhat simpler, is to let your mail client do the work for you.

Again, make sure that your mail provider isn't filtering your email. Then, in your email client, use its rule processing and spam filtering capabilities. For example in Outlook you might create a rule that says "for all messages, move a copy to this folder", and make sure that Outlook's filter is configured to move all junk mail to the junk mail folder. Now those two folders - the one you move all non-junk into, and the junk mail folder - become your archive of everything.

Outlook Express doesn't have a built-in spam filter, but you could certainly use it to automatically forward all email to an account that does. (Yes, that's clunky ... but it could work.) Thunderbird, on the other hand, includes spam filtering, so you may be able to do it all right there along the lines of what I described for Outlook. If you use another email client, your situation may differ.

The Cost

There's one other aspect of all this that I must touch on that I alluded to earlier when I mentioned your ISP possibly having a quota - and that's disk space.

Last year I archived over four and a half gigabytes of email.

Now, disk space is cheap - if it's yours. I absolutely recommend that you download these archives of everything that I'm recommending you create, and possibly even burn them to CD-R (or DVD-R, as I had to do). I'll say it again, disk space is cheap - cheaper, I'll wager, than losing that important email. Depending on how you set this system up, make sure you don't exceed your ISP's limits. If you will, make sure you download that archive every so often (I like once a month) and keep it some place safe.

I think you'll find that regardless of how lax or tight your spam filter, you'll sleep better knowing that your assets are covered.