How to stop the flood of junk mails (spam mails) from flowing into our mailboxes? Two tricks are available for this.
Do you know that my mailbox and other colleagues' mailboxes have been flooded by junk mails from spammers? In YSU (Yogyakarta State University aka Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta, previously known as IKIP Yogyakarta) here we can have a limited space mailbox if we want to have it. The email address will be in the form of
@uny.ac.id. The space is usually 10 Megs. This is comparatively far far smaller than the space provided by free email providers, such as Gmail and Yahoo!. With high daily junk mail flow rate, then we will have additional daily job: removing junk mail spam.
How to solve this? Two tricks are available for this case: 1. Use thunderbird mail client; 2. Use Gmail as spam filterer.
Let's begin with the first method. Follow these steps please:
- Download and instal Mozilla Thunderbird.
- In the case of mail.uny.ac.id mailserver, we are able to create pop and/or imap connection to the server. Choose either or both connection. Each has its own setting to enter in the installed Mozilla Thunderbird.
- Connect using imap connection, I prefer this connection because it is able to directly process folder in the server and at the same time we can have a copy folder in our computer. Open the inbox folder, then you begin to train the Thunderbird to identify which emails are spam, which ones are not.
- When the data is enough, the Thunderbird will eventually automatically recognize whether an email is spam or not. When it is spam, we can automatically instruct the Thunderbird to move it to junk folder. Of course, we should first create a junk folder.
Now, what about the second method? In this method, we should contact mail administrator for email URL for management purpose. I forgot the URL for the case of YSU, but at that time when I opened the URL, I could command the server to forward the email to my email account at Googgle Mail (Gmail). There, we have an option whether we want to have a copy or not in YSU mail server. In my case, I prefer to have a copy. This way, when I receive an email to my YSU server, the mail is saved in the inbox and at the same time it is also forwarded to my gmail account. Upon arriving at Gmail account, it will be processed with advanced spam mail processor. Nearly all spam mails are recognized by Gmail, although sometimes I found one or two emails which are not spam but categorized as spam by Gmail. In this case, I can also command Gmail not to categorize the email as spam, and Gmail will learn from my help (I think).
In summary, at least there are two tricks of countering the flood of junk mails. The first is by using Mozilla thunderbird mail client, the second is by forwarding to gmail or yahoo. Both methods are free! Yet, I prefer the second method.
