Nobody loves spam unless it comes out of a tin, and I’m no exception. When my inbox was filling up even more than usual, it was time to finally take action. Sure, I have a raft of message filters set up to divert a lot of the garbage straight to trash, but it still has to be downloaded in the first place. Wouldn’t it be better not to retrieve it all?
A brief investigation uncovered that one email address was responsible for around 90 per cent of the junk polluting my email inbox. (Clicking the account tab enables users to view their inbox by account. If this is not displaying, go to layout in the View menu to get an instant overview of which email account is attracting the most spam.) Predictably, perhaps, it was to sales@ to my own domain. Though there are email filters in the hosting company’s control panel, they are crude manual jobs that are ineffective and very time-consuming to set up and maintain. Since this one account would normally harvest 200 odd spam messages each morning, this was a long overdue job.
First thing to do was to download all the remaining messages from this account by popping it one last time. As sales@ was a POP3 mailbox, the next step in the hosting company’s control panel was to delete this mailbox. However, as sales@ did actually produce some genuine messages I didn’t want to simply obliterate it entirely. So the solution was to recreate sales@ as a forwarding address and point it to an ISP email account in order to take advantage of their server level spam filtering defences.
Now, you’re probably a step ahead at this point and wondering about replies. Obviously you don’t want to be replying from an ISP email account when you have your own domain. The answer in my circumstances was a bit of fancy footwork in my email software, Mozilla Thunderbird.
To camouflage the daft ISP email account it was necessary to tweak a few accounts settings (Tools/Account settings). Selecting the ISP account, the new destination for sales@ , I changed the Account name to Sales and in the default identity updated the Your name text field and inserted sales@mydomain.co.uk in the Email Address box. In the Outgoing Server (SMTP) box I ensured this was set to send from mail.mydomain.co.uk. Server settings for the POP3 mail server remain the same.
In effect, what you are doing is creating an email account that picks up from the ISP and sends from your own domain.
The same trick can sometimes be done in Outlook Express by going Tools/Accounts, selecting the ISP account you wish to use and then clicking the Properties button. Again, change the account name to something suitable and put in the domain email address you wish to use. On the Servers tab, change the Outgoing mail (SMTP) to mail.yourdomain.com and at Outgoing Mail Server check the box beside My server requires authentication, then click the Settings button.
In the new window that pops up, click the radio button at Log on using and enter the log on details for your domain’s email then click OK and Apply. Test the email account by sending yourself a message and replying to it. You may have to go back in and check the Log on using Secure Password Authentication box if you can’t send mail from your own domain.
** As ever, don’t muck around with email settings unless you know how to put things right if you get it wrong. Better still, copy all the settings into a new test account. The above is a rule of thumb and may not work properly in all scenarios.
