Even users who are very careful with their primary email address may end up with spam in their inbox. Think of friends who upload their email contacts list to a service like Facebook, or computers that get hacked.

The following guide shows you how you can block most of the spam before it reaches your inbox. It requires some configuration and maintenance on the other hand if done right.

The technique uses a secondary account as a spam blocker. You basically setup a secondary account at a free hoster, Gmail or Hotmail l for instance and configure forwarding rules for all the emails that you want to receive in your primary account.

Signing Up For A New Email Account

Please note that it may not be necessary to sign up for a new account. Hotmail for instance supports the creation of fully independent email aliases which can be used for the purpose. Lets say we have made the decision to create a new Gmail account. Visit the Gmail sign up page http://mail.google.com/mail/signup/ and create the account.

Fill out all the details on the page until the account has been setup. You should have two email accounts by now.

Configuring the forwarding and spam blocking

It is theoretically possible to use the second account from now on for everything web related. This would mean that you need to access the account regularly to check for new emails. A more comfortable solution would be to configure email forwarding and filters to forward all legit emails to your real email account, and to block everything else that is spam.

Before you can create filters to forward emails in Gmail you need to allow your primary email address to be set as a forwarding email address. Click the settings icon in the upper right corner and select Mail Settings from the options.

Now switch to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab and click the Add a forwarding address button.

Here you enter your primary address.

A confirmation message is send to the email address. You basically need to click on the link to accept the forwarding. Now you have two options to create filters to forward messages. The easiest option is to create filters if you already have emails in the account that you want to forward. Click on the Gmail inbox and then a message that is not spam that you want to forward to your primary account. Click the More Options button and there the Filter messages like these link.

This opens a new page with a listing of all emails that match the sender email address. You can modify the settings if you like which is necessary if you want to accept some messages but not all from a sender. You can add filters for several parameters, including subject, words included or not included or recipient.

Click on the Next Step button after the process. Place a checkmark in the Forward it to box, the forward email should be the one that you have added to the Gmail account earlier.

A click on Apply Filter adds the filter to the Gmail address. All new emails that match the filter are from that point on automatically forwarded to your primary email address. You can check the Also apply filter to x conversations below to forward all existing matching emails as well.

You now need to repeat that process for all legit emails. It is a one time process that takes some time to setup. If you do not have emails in your inbox you can create filters via Mail Settings > Filters. You do however need to know the sender address or another characteristic of the emails that you want to filter.

Two options are available for sending emails with the second client. Desktop email users can add the secondary email address to their mail program. Web mail users on the other hand need to load the web mail interface if they want to send emails.

Hotmail

It gets a little bit complicated if you want to apply the method to a secondary Hotmail account. You first need to create a Windows Live Hotmail account, the sign up url is accessible here. Existing Hotmail users can alternatively add an email alias to their account. Log into the account once it has been setup and click on Options > More Options in the upper right corner.

Click Filters and Reporting from the available options and switch from the standard junk mail filter to exclusive. This sends all emails but whitelisted and official Hotmail emails to the junk.

Now click on Safe Senders, select Safe Senders again on the next screen and add email addresses that you consider safe. You may need to look in the junk mailbox at the beginning as the majority of emails will be moved automatically to it.

Go back to options once you are finished. You need to add the forwarding email address in the last step. Click on Email Forwarding in the options menu, select Forward your mail to another email account and add your primary email to the form.

You may want to check the Keep a copy of forwarded messages in your Windows Live Hotmail inbox. A click on Save saves the new forwarding information. All inbox emails are from that moment on forward to your primary email address.

Closing Words

Setting up a secondary email address with whitelist forwarding is an effective but time consuming way of protecting your primary email account from landing in spam databases. It is however sometimes necessary to add new filters to the whitelist from time to time, for instance after signing up for a new service that sends out emails regularly. Account confirmation emails and the like on the other hand do not necessarily need filters setup.

Conversations is a new add-on for the Mozilla Thunderbird 3.3 email client that came out of Mozilla Labs. Conversations basically collects all emails of a conversation in Thunderbird and displays them on a single page in the browser, so that it becomes possible to read all messages without having to switch to another email or frantically trying to find the one message that you cannot find somehow.

Probably the best feature of the add-on is the global reach of it. It does not only find emails belonging to the same conversation in the active folder, no, it finds them globally so that users can be sure that every message gets included in the view.

Unread messages are automatically expanded while read messages show up collapsed, just like in Gmail. The extension works nicely with the Contacts extension which adds contact tooltips to the application. This includes their avatars and social networking profiles.

Another useful feature is the quick reply option that allows a user to quickly reply to messages by filling out the quick reply form displayed below messages.

Take a look at the video below for a quick introduction of Conversations.

Users who want to try Conversations need to download and install the first alpha version of Mozilla Thunderbird 3.3. Currently known issues are displayed on the Mozilla Labs page of the add-on, and users should take a look at the list before they install the alpha of Thunderbird 3.3 or the add-on.

On a related note: Thunderbird 3.3 looks really nice, especially the quality of the font and display seems to have been improved quite a bit. (via)

A third option is provided by the Thunderbird add-on eMarks which supposedly stands for email bookmarks. The add-on adds a new toolbar to the email client. Emails can then be dragged and dropped into that toolbar easily. This makes these emails available from every folder the user might be in. These emails are then accessible with a left-click of the mouse. Thunderbird will automatically switch to the folder the email is stored in and display it in the preview pane.

A right-click on any bookmarked email will open a context menu with options to open the email in a new window or tab and to rename or delete it. Users who prefer no additional toolbar in the email client can disable it and access the bookmarked emails from the file menu at the top. An emarks entry is added by the extension that can be used to access the bookmarked emails with three clicks of the mouse. Not as comfortable as the toolbar solution but better if space is an issue.

The eMarks extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client is available at the Mozilla Thunderbird website. It is compatible with all the latest versions of the desktop email client (including Thunderbird 3 beta).

That’s in contrast to online email services which are always connected to the Internet and can send out emails at any time providing they offer the ability to schedule emails which the most popular (Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail) do not at this time. There are however third party services that can be used in this case.

Microsoft Outlook on the other hand makes it dead simple to schedule emails. All the user needs to do is to create a new email message, switch to the Options menu at the top of the screen and click on the delay delivery button under More Options in the ribbon.

This will open a new menu with the option to define a delivery data and time. Microsoft Outlook will not send out the email before the specified date. It will send out the email as soon as possible once the date and time is reached which is usually instantly if the computer is on and Outlook open.

The menu needs to be closed afterwards. The email can now be written as usual and send out. Outlook will recognize the date the email is scheduled and put it in the Outbox for the time being.

There might be white hat reasons for running a bot on a website to retrieve all the email messages found. A reason that comes to mind is to locate all emails that are posted on a public website to remove them from that website in order to protect the owner from spam.

Droid Email Seeker is one of the few free email extractors that are available for the Windows operating system. It can be used to quickly scan a website for email messages. It will begin crawling the website at the specified url and follow all inbound links that point to other pages on the same website. It will also ignore links pointing to other websites.

Another option of using the software is to let it search for keywords on Google and check the websites that turn up as results for email addresses. The number of sites can be specified. It is a little bit irritating that the process of scanning a website cannot be stopped from within the application. The only way is to terminate the program in Windows.

The email extractor software supports web proxies which it can verify. All email addresses that are found on the websites that are crawled will be added to a database. This email database can be exported as a csv file at any time. Droid Email Seeker requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 to be installed on the computer system.

Enabling POP3 in Gmail is therefor a two-step process. POP3 needs to be enabled on the Gmail website first before the other email client is configured to connect to Gmail using the POP3 protocol.

Enabling Gmail POP3

Open the Gmail homepage, log into your Gmail account and click on the [Settings] link in the top right corner of the screen to open the Gmail configuration. Now select the [Forwarding and POP/IMAP] link which should open a page just like the one you see below on the screenshot.

You basically got two options here to enable POP3. The first [Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)] enables POP3 in Gmail for all email messages even those that have already been retrieved while the second [Enable POP for mail that arrives from now on] enables POP3 from that moment on which means that old emails cannot be retrieved. A click on the Save Changes button will save the changes and allow POP3 connections.

Gmail POP3 Data

It is time to create the accounts in the email client now that POP3 has been enabled in Gmail. The procedure is different depending on the email client at hand. Below are the values that need to be entered into the email client.

Email Address: Enter your full Gmail email address
Password: Enter your email password
Incoming Server: pop.gmail.com
Incoming Server Port: 995
Outgoing Server: smtp.gmail.com
Outgoing server (SMTP) port: 587
Encryption: TLS

You can check out the help pages over at Gmail that contain configuration walkthroughs for various popular email clients.

All these parameters are handled in the Thunderbird configuration file. To get there click on [Tools] then [Options] to open the visible settings. Now click on the [Advanced] tab and there on the [Config Editor] entry which should open the Thunderbird configuration file which resembles that of the Firefox web browser.

Filter for the term [mailnews.reply] which should display nine entries that define several options when replying to emails in the Thunderbird email client.

Probably the most interesting parameters in these options are:

• mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote – Change the default [%s wrote] to something else. The [%s] variable defines the name of the writer of the original email.
• mailnews.reply_header_ondate – Change the default [On %s] to something else. The [%s] variable defines the date the original email was received.
• mailnews.reply_header_originalmessage – Change the default [-------- Original Message --------] to something else or remove it completely if you feel it is not needed.

You can change a value by double-clicking on its line in the configuration menu of the Thunderbird email client.

The email recovery software will post a list of all available hard drives at the beginning of which the user can select one that should be crawled for deleted emails. The scan of the hard drive depends largely on its size and the available resources. The email recovery application will display the progress at the top of the window including the emails that have been found so far.

The emails can be accessed right away even if the scan of the hard drive is still underway which is excellent if time is of essence. It can happen that the preview of some of the recovered emails is not shown at all or only partially which means that this email is not recoverable completely.

Emails that have been discovered during the scan can not only be previewed but also exported as a txt or eml document. The txt documents are more easily accessible while the eml format can be used to import the emails into email programs like Microsoft Outlook but also Mozilla Thunderbird and others.

It has to be noted that Mail Cure will not only find Outlook Express email messages but also other email messages. A test on a computer that never made use of Outlook Express but Mozilla Thunderbird resulted in thousands of mail messages that have been found after the scan.

The emails can be sorted in various ways including by sender, date or subject. It is furthermore possible to search for text in all emails that have been found so far. Mail Cure is an excellent email recovery software. Its portable nature makes it an ideal companion for a portable tool collection.

Messages can be archived pressing the A key highlighted or by using the archive button that appears in the header area of each message. They will be automatically sorted into the correct year and month folder in the mail structure. That’s very handy for users who receive lots of messages per day that they have to keep.

Another change is a central activity manager that lists the most recent changes in the email client, e.g. retrieving or moving mail. That’s not a lot of new features but Thunderbird was already a very solid mail client. Especially the archiving feature can save lots of time for some users. Thunderbird 3 beta 2 is available for all supported operating systems and languages.

The utility has to be configured before it can be used. It uses a few configuration screens to configure the SMS provider and cell phone, the email account, filtering rules for the emails and an SMS template.

The default values are to check every 15 minutes for new emails int he configured account. The username and password of the ICQ account have to be added to the software. If the user selects Skype as the SMS provider nothing has to be configured as those information are taken directly from the Skype client.

Labels can be selected if Gmail is chosen as the account type. Both Gmail and POP3 have to be configured with the username and password. Two rules can be defined to process incoming emails only during a specific timeframe and/or by using a sender whitelist.

The program has to be running in the background to be able to check the email account regularly and send sms messages out if new emails have arrived that are matching the rules.

GSN SMS Notifier runs on Windows XP or Windows Vista and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0.

Auto-CC is an extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client that can configure the email client to automatically send CC or BCC emails whenever an email is send from the program. The extension is currently experimental which means that users need to log into the Mozilla website before they can download and install the mail extension.

The email address that the messages are send to has to be configured in the Thunderbird Config Editor. The editor can be accessed by clicking on Tools > Options, selecting the Advanced tab and clicking on the Config Editor button. Adding the auto_cc filter will display four parameters of the Thunderbird extension.

• extensions.auto_cc.auto_cc_address: Double-click to enter the email address that will receive the CC or BCC emails.
• extensions.auto_cc.enabled: Auto-CC is enabled if set to true and disabled if set to false
• extensions.auto_cc.send_as_bcc: Will send the emails as BCC instead of CC if set to true.

A button can be added to the Compose toolbar to quickly turn the feature on or off. One thing that this extension is missing is the ability to select CC or BCC emails on an account basis. As of now all accounts are affected if the extension is enabled which might be ok in a work environment but not at home. The toolbar button is not the perfect solution because it quickly becomes an inconvenience to turn the extension or or off several times a day depending on the emails that are send out. It is also likely that the user will forget to turn on or off the extension from time to time.

As of now it’s a great solution for users who use Thunderbird in a work environment which requires to BCC or CC emails to another email address.

Update: Auto CC has been discontinued. Thunderbird 3 users can configure automatic CC and automatic BCC in the account settings of the individual email account. This is reached via Tools > Account Settings > Copies & Folders (of each account). Multiple email addresses can be added to Cc these email addresses and Bcc these email addresses.

The built-in feature is more powerful than what the add-on offered, as it is possible to enter multiple email recipients.

This requires some explanation. The user signs up and picks a username during the setup. The domain for his email is then created automatically using the formula @username.otherinbox.com. Every email alias that is put in front of the @ will automatically create a new filter and folder for that alias.

This effectively means unlimited email addresses for every user which are harder to guess than those from similar services such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. This does however mean that every email will reach the inbox and that a new folder and filter will be created for them automatically.

Otherinbox can be used to send emails from the available or newly created aliases as well. The real question is if someone would really need Otherinbox. It is not a problem to create a new webmail account and create filters for marketing and networking websites. The only difference is that Otherinbox provides automatic filter generation while they have to be created manually using the other webmail services.

Is that enough to make the service worthwhile? That’s up for you decide. The Otherinbox team provided Ghacks readers with 25 email addresses. Just head over to http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/ghacksnet and signup. The first 25 to signup get the beta account.

Email Recovery can do that. It can analyze dbx files to recover as many emails as possible from the file. Each recovered email will be saved in the eml format which can be imported back into Microsoft Outlook Express and most other email clients. The analysis is done in a read-only mode which means that the dbx files will be read but not edited or changed in any way.

The recovery software scans the entire dbx file and not only the mail headers to find out if a mail can be recovered. Cautious users can still create a backup of the dbx file and try to restore the emails after creating the backup.

Email Recovery is a handy tool if emails cannot be read anymore or have been deleted accidentally. It can only recover deleted emails if the folders have not been compressed.

Some of my favorites include “I’m not normally a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me, Superman!” – Homer Simpson”, ” A hacker does for love what others would not do for money.” and ” Stewardesses is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.”

The article “reading email headers – all about email headers” gives you an in depth overview about email headers. Everything is explained with examples which makes it easy to follow through, even for people who lack the tech background.  It begins with a introduction “where mail comes from” and details “mail protocols” thereafter. The final part consists of a list of common mail headers which is great if you want to understand a certain part of the header.

Update: The guide is divided into four chapters. Displaying email headers explains how you display email headers in popular email clients such as Outlook, Netscape or Eudora. Please note that the article has been written in a time where popular clients like Thunderbird have not been created yet.

Received headers detail the emails origin and the route it took to get to you. These information are displayed in reverse order which means that the last received header in the email is in fact the first that received the email, and the first in the listing is usually the mail server of the email provider.

The last received header details what you can find out about the first server that processed the email. This can be helpful to identify the origin of the email which in turn can be used to report an email as spam or malicious.

Other headers finally lists other common email headers that you may come upon in emails.

Some tips nevertheless are really easy to adopt, for instance adding REMOVETHIS to the email address which would look like admin@REMOVETHISghacks.net. Most bots have problems with these and its unlikely that someone checks the collected emails manually.

[tags]email, hide email address, spam[/tags]

Still, you need the information and don´t want to search for another site that carries it and does not require registration. Rest assured, there is a way you can get the information from the site that requires registration (and a validation through email) without using one of your precious emails.

The concept is known as “disposable email” or one use email adresses. You have to register at the site, but use a email address from a disposable email service (that looks like “YouSelectThisName@DisposableEmailService.com) . The validation email is send to the disposable email address, you read it there, click on the validation link and your account is active and you can reach the page with the information you needed.

Let me give you one word of advice, you should not be using a disposable email service if you want to use your account for personal use, e.g. signing up in a forum. Everyone is able to read emails that are sent to the email address you specified, that means, everyone is able to request a new password and read the email that contains it. You should make sure that either you can hide your email from everyone except maybe administrators or signup with a real email.

I compiled a list of disposable email services, some may be banned at the site you want to register but normally a few are working without problems.

No registration:

6url.com

dodgeit.com – can´t delete mail, expires after 7 days

greensloth.com – deleted after 4 hours

jetable.org – forwards to real email address

mailinator.com – deleted after a few hours

spam.la – all new email readable to everyone

spamday.com – account exists for 24 hours, after that its deleted.

tempinbox.com –

Registration required:

e4ward.com – forwards email to your real account.

gishpuppy.com – forwards email to your real account.

kasmail.com

mailmoat.com

mailnull.com – forwards email to your real account

sneakemail.com – forwards email to your real account

spamgourmet.com – forwards email to your real account

spammotel.com – forwards email to your real account

willhackforfood.biz

Pay for use:

emailias.com

netmails.com

zoemail.com