Microsoft and New York State Attorney Elliot Spitzer are <a href=http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,113939,00.asp>teaming up to sue</a> the third most prolific spammer on the web. This spammer is estimated to be sending out 250 million spams per day.

So you have been gone for a few days and need to go through 10,000+ emails, the vast majority of which are spam. Here are some ideas that will help speed up this process:

- sort emails by “sender.” This will allow you to view who sent you the mail and you can easily eliminate all the “unknown” and 12345 at blah, blah, as well as sort out your known friends alphabetically. Yes, there will be some people who use people you know addresses and you’ll have to look beyond the sender name for it to be fresh, but you can eliminate a large number of spam without ever reading by using the sender column.
- in the case of “admin” or “administrator” look at the subject lines for legitimate subjects, most will be obviously spam
- consider whitelisting your friends so that they don’t end up in the default inbox but in a special whitelist folder
- create filters for repetitive spammers using keywords from names or body text or URLs in the spam message

Did this post make you go hmm?

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