>
> After my post, I received a helpful private correspondence from T.
> Muddletin (who sometimes has posted here). His/her suggestion was
> rather simple, and rather clever. I feel that I should have thought of
> it myself. The idea was to use the FILTER program, and set up several
> rules that directed messages to each of your legitimate addresses to
> INBOX. This should include actual email addresses you hold, as well
> list addresses that you know you receive legitimately. After all those
> INBOX rules, have a final 'z-SPAM' rule (alphabetically the last rule)
> that directs everything else to a SPAMBOX folder (or just deletes it).
>
I do something similar. I have two users set up under Yarn, one called
Default and one called Alan. I have two mailboxes I use regularly, but
the mailboxes do not match the users.
Anything from any mailbox addressed to "fairlysecretname"@ is filtered
to the Alan user's inbox, as this is the name I only use in private
email. I think of this as "positive" filtering. Most of the other stuff
goes straight into the default inbox. Except for the stuff which is
"negatively" filtered. I post in newsgroups as mundungus@ or scatolgy@
with a comment to change mundungus to AC. Any mundungus mail goes into
a special folder called scatologymail. With Yarn, I can just glance at
the subject line in the scatology folder. But human emailers usually
change the mundugus whilst the robots do not, so it all usually goes
into the proper place.
I also have a unique address on my web site and different addresses for
mailists. I register on websites in different names - I'm
fromorange@coprolite... on the orange website.
The positive filtering means that all the "real" email is in one
folder. The negative filtering removes the known rubbish. The rest,
such as the Byte newsletter, ISP semi-spams (ISP newsletter) just go
into the default box
I used to get a lot of spam when I used just one address. I started
using different names so I could try and identify the original source
of my name and also so I could easily filter out any name if it became
a nuisance.
Alan