Hands-On Tech 199: Managing Spam Emails

Summary

Podcast Summary: Hands-On Tech Episode 199 – Managing Spam Emails

Release Date: January 19, 2025
Host: Micah Sargent
Podcast: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)

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Introduction

In Episode 199 of Hands-On Tech, Micah Sargent tackles a prevalent issue faced by many internet users: managing and filtering spam emails. This comprehensive discussion provides listeners with practical solutions to reduce unwanted and potentially harmful emails, ensuring a cleaner and more secure inbox experience.

Listener Question

Micah opens the episode by addressing a listener-submitted question from Lars, who is seeking advice to help a friend overwhelmed by spam and scam emails. The friend's current email setup involves a Cox email address, now managed by Yahoo, and he prefers using Outlook as his mail client. The crux of the problem revolves around excessive spam threatening account closures unless fraudulent payments are made, prompting the need for an effective spam filtering solution.

Solutions Suggested

1. Transitioning to a New Email Provider

Micah emphasizes the long-term benefits of migrating from an aging ISP-tied email service to a more reliable and spam-friendly provider. He suggests that starting fresh with a new email account can significantly reduce spam issues and offer better control over email management.

Micah Sargent [03:15]: "I want to encourage your friend to consider getting a new account... It's a good choice to make."

2. Utilizing Gmail’s Spam Filtering with Outlook

For those who prefer to maintain their Outlook interface, Micah proposes integrating Gmail’s robust spam filtering capabilities. By setting up a Gmail account to import emails from the Cox/Yahoo account, spam can be effectively filtered before it reaches Outlook.

Micah Sargent [06:45]: "Create the Gmail account and tell Gmail to pull that mail over, and then set up that Gmail account with their local Outlook client."

This method leverages Gmail’s advanced filtering while allowing continued use of the familiar Outlook client, providing a seamless transition and enhanced spam control.

3. Implementing Local Spam Filtering Programs

In scenarios where changing the email provider is not feasible, Micah recommends using local spam filtering software. Programs like MailWasher can be installed on the user’s computer to filter spam before it reaches the Outlook inbox. These tools often use Bayesian filtering, which learns to identify spam based on user feedback.

Micah Sargent [09:20]: "Mail Washer... serves as a local program that lets you run spam filtering before it gets to your inbox."

He highlights the advantage of having more granular control over spam filtering and the ability to train the filter to recognize specific types of unwanted emails, thereby improving accuracy over time.

4. Additional Considerations

Micah also addresses the importance of moving away from ISP-provided email services due to their inherent limitations and susceptibility to spam. He points out that modern email providers offer better security features, improved spam detection, and more reliable service management.

Micah Sargent [12:50]: "Getting away from these ISP email addresses that just get passed between company to company... is worth considering."

Moreover, he touches on privacy concerns associated with using services like Gmail, where email data may be used for targeted advertising. Users should weigh the benefits of robust spam filtering against potential privacy trade-offs.

Notable Quotes

• Micah Sargent [03:15]: "I want to encourage your friend to consider getting a new account... It's a good choice to make."

• Micah Sargent [06:45]: "Create the Gmail account and tell Gmail to pull that mail over, and then set up that Gmail account with their local Outlook client."

• Micah Sargent [09:20]: "Mail Washer... serves as a local program that lets you run spam filtering before it gets to your inbox."

• Micah Sargent [12:50]: "Getting away from these ISP email addresses that just get passed between company to company... is worth considering."

Conclusion

Micah Sargent provides a thorough exploration of spam email management strategies, balancing immediate solutions with long-term recommendations. By advocating for the use of reliable email providers, leveraging powerful spam filtering tools, and considering the implications of privacy, Micah equips listeners with the knowledge to reclaim control over their email communications. Whether opting for a transition to a new provider like Gmail or implementing local filtering software, these strategies aim to significantly reduce spam and enhance overall email security.

For more insights and detailed discussions on managing spam emails, tuning into this episode of Hands-On Tech is highly recommended.

Transcript

[Micah Sargent]

Coming up on Hands On Tech, we take a look at filtering out that dirty, dirty spam. Stay tuned for this episode of Hands On Tech.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Twit.

[NerdWallet]

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[Micah Sargent]

Hello and welcome to Hands On Tech, the show where I, Micah Sargent, take your tech questions and do my best to answer them. Are getting a question that I think a lot of people have, but it plays out differently for different people. It's all about the setup that you have. The question comes in from Lars, who's actually asking a question for a friend, which is kind of a funny moment because I do genuinely believe that this is a question for Lars friend, whereas sometimes when we say asking for a friend, it doesn't really mean that. Anyway, Lars writes in and says I am trying to help a friend who is being bombarded with spam and all kinds of scam Emails that are threatening to close accounts if he does not increase space in his icloud account or similar other types of ways to make him pay money to get a fake problem resolved. He has a Cox email address in Southern California. Cox is no longer handling their email account but has given it over to Yahoo. He does not like to use Yahoo Webmail interface and prefers to continue using Outlook as his mail client. I don't blame you. Is there a spam filtering service which can filter his emails before it reaches his Outlook client and offer ways to control the way it is filtering the spam emails? Please help us out with this spam filtering issue so he can be more in control of the type of emails he receives. All right, so Lars, I'm going to start by saying this. There are a lot of people out there who have these email services that are tied to their Internet service providers and they've used these email accounts for years. And it's understandable that because you've used these email accounts for years, you want to continue to use these email accounts because people have them. They have, you know, the address. It's the same thing as using a phone number. Right? But I want to encourage your friend Lars to your friend comma Lars to consider getting a new account. And here's the thing. When you get a new account, you can do a few different options. You can have it so that your email autoresponds and says, hey, come and find me at my new account. You can set it up so that your email forwards from that old account to your new account. You can set it up in many cases where the new email will actually pull from the Cox email. And all of those are going to help deal with the long term issue, which is this shifting and shuffling of email accounts to different people. What happens if Yahoo, the cockroach of tech companies, eventually does succumb to nuclear winter? Then you don't know where it's going to go next. You don't know who's going to be managing that email account. And that's a problem. So in that way, I suggest really, really, really strongly encouraging your friend to stop using this old email account or as I mentioned, kind of forward it to another email account in the first place. And this is before we get into the spam stuff I'm just talking about in general, this is a good choice to make. Now there are loads of different email providers out there and of course Fast Mail has been a sponsor on the network. Fastmail is an email account service that I've used. I'VE also used Hover's email Hover previous sponsor as well. I used Gmail, I've used Apple's icloud account. I mean, there are all of these different options that are more likely to not disappear into the ether slash have some of these spam problems. So that's first and foremost. But I want to meet you where you are Lars's friend. And so we have a few. We have a couple of options here because Cox Email likely doesn't give you the ability to access and change MX records, which are kind of. It's a special sort of instruction, we'll say, tied to that email that lets you tell it to send information to a different place. Let's go with that. That's a kind of basic understanding of an MX record because you don't have access to that. There are some tools that are going to be unavailable to. Because those tools would essentially get in the way in a good way and let the spam and stuff come in and then filter it out before it gets to you and do that in a way that feels a little bit kind of cleaner. That's not an option with a Cox email. I'm almost certain I don't have a Cox email, so I can't say for sure. But I would be surprised because most ISPs don't offer that level because they are not email providers first and foremost. Unlike if you were to purchase an email from Hover, in which case you would have access to the. And in fact, I do have access to the MX records and it's how I was able to use Fast Mail with a Hover domain that I purchased to set up the proper email stuff. Now, because of that, we have a couple of options. The first solution I'm going to suggest is that your friend makes a Gmail account. Now, don't panic, hold on, calm down, everything's fine. Makes a Gmail account and leverages Gmail's relatively excellent, mostly excellent, spam filtering. And what you do in this case is you essentially create the Gmail account and you tell Gmail, because there's an. I think it's called import and accounts. There's an important accounts setting that lets Gmail go to this Cox email address, pull that mail over, plop it into the Gmail account, and then your friend just sets up that Gmail account with their local Outlook client. So if you like to use Outlook, you can continue to use it as your mail client, but it's coming from Gmail, which is serving as this kind of it is kind of like what we're talking about, the MX records thing, where yes, email is going to the Cox account, Gmail is pulling it in. When it pulls it in, it filters out the spam and then the good stuff makes its way down into Outlook. That's one solution. But there is another solution here, and that is a local mail program, spam filtering program. There are quite a few programs out there and it's going to depend on what platform you're using, what, what operating system you're using. And so if you are using, if you are using Windows, then Mail Washer, which is [e-mail] is available as a potential option because what it does is it serves as a local program that lets you run spam filtering before it gets to your inbox. And here's what's cool about it. It uses Bayesian filtering, so it has some kind of basic spam filtering built in, but you train it. So you had mentioned, what did you say? Is there a spam filtering service which can filter his emails before it reaches his Outlook client and offer ways to control the way it is filtering the spam emails? That's precisely what this tool does. So it will give you the ability to not only kind of have a base level of spam filtering, but by way of the Bayesian filters, it will learn what you consider spam, what you don't consider spam, and when it gets it wrong and you say, no, no, that should not be spam, it adjusts its filters as such, so all of that can kind of come together to give you what you're looking for. Now this program is available for free and I have seen positive, positive reviews about it. But again, there are other options out there and it's just going to depend on what solution you choose to use. Like Spambully is another option that's available. Again, there are third party services like Spam Fighter and Clean IO, but in many cases those are more tied to that online portion and the MX records stuff. So if Cox is not allowing for you to change the MX records, then that's not something you're going to be able to use, but it is a great way to go about doing your spam filtering locally and again, having a little bit more control. I think Google's spam filtering gives you some level of control, but your friend would need to go to the Google account and start to train the system and change how it's doing the filtering. And so by doing that, it's this other kind of midway step that Something like mail washer, which feels more local to your system because you are running it on your computer and kind of starting there makes it a little bit better and I think kind of more easy to, to grok. But in any case, these solutions should be what you're looking for in terms of spam filtering and ultimately it's advice that I would give to others as well. You know, Google and Gmail has its share of of issues in terms of the privacy implications therein. Gmail of course serves ads, but based on your behaviors and the kind of base understanding of what email you're receiving, Google asserts that they don't full on read emails. But having, you know, a base level understanding of the mail you're receiving and from whom it comes can give the the system some information about what it should market to you. So that's something to always keep in mind. And that's where something like mail washer or another tool might be better suited to your needs. But the quick and easy solution I do truly believe is Gmail. Not only in the case of using that spam filtering, but more importantly, and I think most importantly, getting away from these ISP email addresses that just get passed between company to company and have outages all the time and in some cases are filtered out of messages that get sent. So sometimes your email can end up in spam because it's coming from one of these old ISP email addresses. Yeah, all of those are reasons why it's worth, you know, stepping into the future with us and considering leaving something like that behind or making that slow transition away. So Lars, thank you for your question there and thank you for giving me the opportunity to open up the possibilities.

[NerdWallet]

For more people, nerds, listeners. As we go into a new year, we all have a lot on our plates. There are backpacking trips across Europe to plan, personal best to crush in the gym and capsule wardrobes to create Good thing. Our sponsor, NerdWallet is here to take one thing off your plate. Finding the best financial products, introducing NerdWallet's 2025 Best of Awards list your shortcut to the best credit cards, savings accounts and more. The nerds have done the work for you, researching and reviewing over 1100 financial products to bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a balanced transfer credit card with 0% APR? They've got a winner for that. Or a bank account with a top rate to hit your savings goals. They've got a winner for that too. Know you're getting the best products for you without doing all the research yourself. So let NerdWallet do the heavy lifting for your finances this year and head over to their 2025 Best of Awards at NerdWallet.com awards to find the best financial products today.

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If you have a locked AT&T phone, we're here with bolt cutters. T Mobile will help pay off your locked phone and give you a new 5G phone for free. All on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom via virtual prepaid.

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[Micah Sargent]

Devices early all right, before we go, let me start by telling you about Club Twit and then I've got a little announcement for you. So first and foremost, Club Twit. To those of you who are tuning in live, especially if you're chatting with me in the Discord, you know about Club Twit. You're part of Club Twit, Twit tv Club Twit. For a limited time we are continuing to offer two weeks of Club Twit for free. So be sure to sign up for that to give it a go and see if it's for you. I think you will find that it is. Club Twit gives you access to ad free versions of all of our shows. It gives you access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and also those of us here at twit. It gives you access to the Twit plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes, before the show, after the show and everything in between. And it gives you access to the video versions of our Club Twitch shows. So those are hands on iOS, hands on Mac. Excuse me, not hands on iOS, iOS today, hands on Mac, hands on Windows and so many more great shows where in in public you get to hear the audio, but if you want to see the video then you gotta join the club. For those of you tuning in again live who are members of Club Twit, if you're hearing it after the fact, then you won't, you know, hear this part. But Twit TV Club Twit slash Referral is where you can go to join or rather to invite your friends. And when you do, you earn free months of Club Twit when your friends sign up. So definite, be sure to check that out. And then of course I want to remind you all that we are currently running our beginning of the year survey. So please head to Twitter TV Survey25 to take the survey. I promise you it's only going to take you a couple of minutes. No, I should say a few minutes. It's a very short survey, but it just gives us a little bit of information, general information about the audience so that we know who you are, what you are interested in and also so that we can let our sponsors know that, you know, they're still sending ads to the people that they think they are, that, you know, your interests are aligned, so to speak, with theirs. So it's incredibly helpful, incredibly important for us to be able to have that information so that we can let our sponsors know. Hey, yeah, these are the people that are looking for email accounts, new email accounts, that kind of thing. So again, Twitter TV survey 25 for the year 2025. All right, so it is time for a little bitty announcement. You have probably noticed if you are watching live or after the fact, that I have been answering one question on the show the past couple of weeks. Before I was answering, you know, multiple questions in an episode. The show was, you know, 30, 45 minutes to an hour before and now is often, you know, 15, 20 minutes. That is because of an upcoming change that we have as Twit continues to attempt to, you know, push through, survive, exist in, in this space. We find ourselves, we have to occasional make changes. And one of those changes is the exit of hands on tech from the public sphere into the Club Twit sphere. So for those of you watching live right now who are chatting with me in the discord, you are in luck because things are going to be relatively the same for you. It is a change for the people who have been watching the show who are not members of Club Twit, who will now only have access to the audio version of the show. If you want to see this bright shining face smiling at you every week, then, well, yes, every week then you will need to become a member of Club Twit. Now we'll have a blog post out that explains the nitty gritty, but here's how this is going to look going forward. Next week, January 26th, I will record another episode that's like this. It's still going to the public, it's still One question and it is, and maybe some feedback. And it will be video and audio to the public and to you members of Club Twit. Yours will continue to not have ads. The public one is probably not going to have the, the, you know, ads that I read because of the shift. It's, you know, it's hard to have a support show, get that ad support, frankly, a tech support show where the subjects vary widely and wildly. That's a hard show to sell to advertisers. And so, you know, that place plays a role in it. But next week will look like this episode in that it'll be one question on the second, on February 2nd. This is how things are changing going forward. Instead of recording every Sunday, I will be recording once or twice a month and we'll be answering multiple questions. Those will be edited as edited as and released like this episode in that it's one question per episode. But as a member of Club Twit who tunes in on that Sunday, you get to chat, hang out and see the video, the creation of that. So if you have been tuning into to home theater geeks, you'll be familiar with the way that this kind of works. Scott Wilkinson records multiple episodes at a time. He does so with the, you know, live stream turned on so that you all can be part of that. That's how this is going to work. And I'm excited about that because I've kind of been a little, I'll be honest, a little bummed about only getting to answer one question per week these past two, two or three weeks. And so being able to go into, you know, once again, recording and answering multiple questions is going to be great. So look, we want to, we want to continue to not only provide value to those of you who are currently club members, but I think more importantly provide more value to those of you who aren't club members yet. To encourage you to join the club. When you do that, you really are getting, I mean, quite a few perks. But more importantly, I think most importantly, of course, is supporting the work that we do here. And so this is part of that. The show cannot be supported by advertisers and is instead supported by all of you. It's what I said about iOS today when it went into the club as well. You all are the heroes that keep the show going and that will be the same for hands on tech. Occasionally I will do product reviews. Those will probably be published as public episodes, so you will see those out there. But when it comes to these sessions of answering your tech questions. Those will be the video version of those shows will be exclusive to us Club Twit members. So once more, a quick reminder or a quick kind of summary. Next week on Sunday, join me. We'll be doing it live. It'll be an episode like this one and like the one last week. Then on the 2nd, February 2nd, join me live for a longer episode essentially because we will be recording multiple episodes on that day and then after that. As it stands, the show will still publish on Sundays. But stay tuned for the day on which I plan to record those multiple episodes going forward for you all to join me and have a good time. And in fact, if there's a day that really sticks out to you is when you want to have access to this show and hang around and chat, let me know. We can figure it out. So thank you for tuning in this week. As always, you can email me. Hotwit TV is how you get in touch with your questions and I look forward to continue bringing you this show. Again, there still will be an audio version available to the public, so everybody's still going to get the show, but if you want the video version and the sites that we show and the products that we show at times, that is a Club Twit exclusive, as well as chatting with those of you in the Discord. So thanks for tuning in. I'll catch you again next week and the following week and I am looking forward to, you know, what we what we do going forward. So thanks so much and I will talk to you soon.

[Leo Laporte]

Bye bye.

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