For me, I wish I had a SPAM filtering option that stated that if ANY other address is in BCC, then it would be trashed. Even if Postini were close to perfect, I would still have a fear that I am missing a potential customer's email.

This is exactly what I’m looking for! Have hunted high and low in MS Engourage, with no success. If someone knows the magic word (or preference setting), please please let me know!!

-- ArcticStones

I have a rule in Mail set up to trash any mail that doesn't have my address in TO or CC, so anything that's BCC'd to me is automatically in the trash. It's not quite what you're looking for, but it might be close enough to what you want.

Some people fear losing an important email this way, but my feeling is that if it were important for me to read it, then I wouldn't be on the BCC list. ;)

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CWT, do you know how to set up such a rule in Entourage?
I would be grateful!

I don't use Entourage, but I believe it would be very similar to Mail. See attached.

Entourage has similar rules under tools menu

A 5th criterion?
 

I’ve opened Edit Rule under Tools many a time, but now it seems I finally was able to call forth the choices you indicated.

I’ve set four criteria, To and Cc for each of my two email addresses. I would, however, like to add a 5th criterion: that the email is OK if the sender is in my address book. That, however, does not seem possible.

Nevertheless I’m one key step further.
Thanks! :)

Under Criterion I can see "From" in the first menu and "Is in Address Book" in the second.

Another useful one is Attachment > Name Contains >".gif"

cwtnospam - Thank you for that. I will give it a try. Since my Spam goes straight to the trash, I could always monitor it for valid folk before I delete it to oblivion.

Other handy email rules?
 

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Thanks for the good help! I now have three rules in place:
1) Gets rid of blind copy emails.
2) Gets rid of emails with gif attachments
3) Puts all the MacOSXHints notices in their own folder.

I would be very interested in hearing what sort of rules people have set in their own email apps. But perhaps that belongs in a separate thread...

Maybe someone here could create a thread on "Handy Email Rules"?

-- ArcticStones

I would finger the availability of free email accounts as being more of the problem than free email. Rather than charge for carriage how about demand a 'good behaviour' bond - your account gets used (spoofing doesn't count) you lose your bond. And you have to provide another one to continue using it - might force those with lousy security to smarten up a bit.

My other thought is that if 95% of email is spam then the average user's email that s/he actually wants is at most 5%. This tiny figure makes me wonder whether it is more effective to train a semantic filter (such as the one in Mail.app) on email you want to receive (i.e so what gets flagged as junk is good email) and to pass all other email to your 'real' junk folder.

I'm not sure how effective the idea would be, or how to do this because I've only just had the idea, and a beer, stronger than I thought it would be, has robbed me of my higher brain functions.

If so, Bramley, then this is one "consciousness lowering session" in which I would be delighted to join you. So far the results are excellent!

:D

PS. The group Oregon once introduced a piece at a concert with the following words:

I set this rule, but ALL of my mail goes in the trash! I have the following rule...

If "To:" does NOT contain "schneb" then send to trash.

All of the emails with "schneb" in the "To:" address are now going to the trash. Any reason why this is?

If you are checking To and CC in the rule you need to set it to

If "all" of the following conditions are met:

No, just the one. It seems to me, as written, that if my address (which contains "schneb") is NOT in the To: box, that it should go to trash. If it IS in the To: box, it should stay in the inbox. Why is it not acting correctly?

Do you have any other rules or junk mail filtering that could be deleting the message?