Hotmail's Built in Features Keep You Safe and Sane

Sign into your Hotmail account and open your in-box. When you have done that, locate "Options" on the extreme right of the page. It will be the button between "Messenger" and "?". Click on the "Options" button and a new menu will appear. We want the heading at the bottom of the menu that reads "More Options." The third Major Heading in bold type and larger font says, " Junk E-Mail." Click the heading underneath this that says: "Filters and Reporting." You will now see a new menu that says: "Choose a Junk Mail Filter". Please pick "Exclusive." Under the next heading on this same menu where it says "Delete Junk Mail" select, "Later". The third option in the Junk E-Mail menu lets you choose whether or not to report junk to MSN. I report the junk mail, but it's up to you.

What will happen if you set your filter to exclusive is that all of your messages will be put into junk mail until you indicate that the sender is safe. Every day you will open your junk mail folder and click on the messages you want to examine. Every time you open a message, it will ask you to mark as safe or mark as junk.

Only messages that you mark as safe will go directly to your in-box in the future. As time moves on, your in-box will stop having come-on messages from strangers. You can open your Junk folder every day, mark the wanted messages and senders as "safe" so that they will be delivered to your inbox and delete the remaining junk mails at a stroke by checking the box at the top of the heading next to the one that says "sort" to select everything in the box and pressing "delete.".

What do you do about the really poisonous emails that you don't even want to see? Once more, Hotmail comes to the rescue. Sign into your Hotmail account and open your in-box. Once again look for the "Options" button located on the right of the page between "Messenger" and "?". Select "More Options" " from the bottom of the page. You will see your old friend, "Junk E-mail" once more (Second major heading on this list). This time, select the second entry in that sub-menu, "Safe and Blocked Senders."

Here is where you gain complete control over your e-mail life. Remember earlier when I told you to set your Hotmail to send everything to your junk mail file and hold it there for a while so that you could personally okay everyone? The first two entries in this sub-menu, "safe senders" and "safe mailing lists" allow you to quickly okay your favorites in advance and restore them at once to your good graces. The first entry, "Safe Senders", let's you okay your friends. The second entry, "Safe Mailing Lists" allow you to okay entire organizations at a glance. For example a gardener like myself might okay everything from http://www.bbg.org/, which is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

But what do you do about really obnoxious senders, the idiots who promise that they can help women grow their penises? Or the ones shilling toxic drugs? Or obsessed exes, cyberstalkers and nuts? For those, the third entry in this list, "Block Senders" is a godsend. Click that one and messages are deleted without your even seeing them. And if you and your ex are billing and cooing again, you can reverse his banishment here as well.

Don't be at the mercy of the mail. Master this features and you will stay sane and solvent for years to come.