Micah Sargent (0:00)

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Micah Sargent (1:48)

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 available@mailwasher.net 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.