Personal Email Filter for

Operation

• on the white list, it is delivered to your mail box,
• on the black list, it is removed immediately, without even notifying its sender,
• on neither of the lists, it is removed immediately, but the sender gets a reply telling him/her how to put his/her address easily on your white list.

Both, the special address and the automatic reply text (response to unknown senders), are to be formed on page Code and Response (link on the top or bottom line).

If, however, a message comes from some spam generating software rather than from a live person, its sender's address is most likely faked - non-existent, or one of free email services, eg. hotmail, bigfoot, yahoo, valid only for a short time, with its mail box usually overfilled (not accepting any replies). It means your automatic reply to spam senders will not be read by anybody, to say nothing about following the advice it contains. Therefore, no spam sender's address has any practical chance of getting onto your white list. Such addresses will remain unknown, and messages coming from them will not pollute your mail box.

It may happen that spam comes as though from your address - a clever spamming software substitutes your address for its own. To block such spam, put your address on the black list. If, for any reason, you would like to send yourself a message, remove your address from the black list before sending the message, and put it back on the list afterwards.

Addresses that should be on the white list

On page White and black lists (link on the top or bottom line) you will see both of your lists initially empty. You should add to the list addresses of those whose messages are welcome. If you have an address book in your mailing software, you can easily transfer its content to the white list (see instructions on the White and black lists page - upload). Also, make sure addresses of all mailing list you have subscribed to are included. Otherwise you would not get any messages sent to the list. Moreover, each message coming from the list would make your 'Response to unknown senders' go to the message author, if not to the whole list. That surely would not be received too kindly by the author or other subscribers.

There are mailing lists organized in such a way that the sender's address is that of the message author. You do not, however, have to put addresses of all subscribers on your white list. In the message header you can find a line beginning with Reply-To: or Return-Path: or Sender: or List-Post:. It contains the address you should put on your white list to accept messages from any subscriber. Depending on your mailing software such lines may be found in the normal or full header of the message. If you need advice how to retrieve the full header, click here.

The use of Personal Email Filter requires you to develop a certain habit - before sending a message to an address which is not on your white list, put the address on the list. Otherwise, a possible reply from that address would be rejected, and the addressee would get your automatic 'Response to unknown senders', undoubtedly to his/her surprise.

Start and stop of filtering