Another Great Writing Tool
What is one of the worst enemies of effective writing?
For me it is distraction and doing things that are not productive, such as wading through emails to get rid of the spam, or surfing the Internet without clear purpose.
The only strategy for the Internet I have to offer is to set a goal and a timeframe for any Internet research. It helps me sometimes…
However, with the Spam, I am using a tool called SpamArrest.
The statistics on the right show what Spam Arrest has achieved for me in the last 4.5 months. Over 80% spam!
Let’s just say that you need 3 seconds for each spam email to identify it as such and delete it.
That comes to a total of 15 hours that I have saved through this tool.
What does it do?
All emails are checked against a database to see whether you know the sender. If you do, you get the email.
Any sender that is not in your database, receives an email by Spam Arrest, requesting confirmation that they are a real human. Once they do that, any future emails are delivered instantly. The others never even reach you.
Another great feature is that you can set it up in such a way that when you send out an email, the person you send it to is automatically added to the database. That way, they do not have to authenticate themselves.
The Drawbacks
There are two:
It takes a bit of time to set up. You have to import your existing emails into the online tool, you have to change some of your email settings to integrate it all. Takes between 30 and 60 minutes all up. But once that is done, you are free from Spam.
If you are subscribed to any lists where you receive automated emails, you need to authenticate the sending email addresses manually. Usually the list owners will not receive replies to what they send out, so they will not authenticate themselves.
That takes a bit of checking in the beginning. You always have access to the last 7 days of spam messages. I went through them daily for a few weeks, just to make sure that nothing was in there that I wanted.
What to do
They have a free 30 day trial, but if you do not think this is for you, it is probably not worth spending the time to set it all up. If you do go ahead, here are the steps:
- Sign up to the free trial
- Write your personal message that will be sent out to request the authentication
- Import your current addresses into the Spam Arrest database
- Add any domains that you always want to receive emails from (e.g. facebook)
- If you are using Outlook, at your new Spam Arrest email account
- Change the smtp server for your existing email to smtp.spamarrest.com to allow automatic authentication for people you send emails to.
Optionally, you can customize the challenge page, but I think that costs extra.
In the beginning checking the spam messages takes a bit of time (but not more than it does currently), but then comes the day when this writing tool frees you of that.
One last point, they have an hourly limit of how many emails you can receive, but when you ask support, they can lift this limit. They have a great support team, really quick to help out.
Tags: distraction, effective writing, spam email, spam messages, writing tool
