One of the latest SPAM trends has hit us all again. This time it's in the form of hourly, if not more frequent, emails appearing to be from CNN Alerts or MSNBC Breaking News. There are several forms of the email that come through but they all contain links to websites that appear to be CNN.com or MSNBC. The reality is that they are sites hosted on servers that have been hacked. The hackers set up pages that look like cnn.com but instead will install spyware on your machine. The most important thing everyone can do is immediately delete these emails once they get them. But if you're like me, I am getting more and more frustrated by the frequent noise from either outlook or my cellphone (I get push email from Kerio with my AT&T Tilt...the iPhone works now too!). Fortunately, there is relief. For those if you with Kerio, just log into webmail and create a rule. To do this:
- Log into webmail.
- On the top left, click on Settings, then on Mail Filters.
- On the top right, click New to make a new rule.
- You could filter out the emails in several ways at this point. I don't actually get real CNN or MSNBC emails so I chose to select 'Where the subject contains words' in the first box, and 'move it to the specified folder' in the second box. With those selected, you have to click on the highlighted areas in the third box to choose the words and the folder. You can add multiple sets of words to search for. I set it to look for "msnbc.com - breaking news" and "CNN Alerts". Then I chose the junk mail folder so it automatically gets put in there and I don't even have to look at it.
If you use another mail provider besides Kerio, check with your mail provider to see if they support rules. You can also set up the same rule much the same way in your email client (like MS outlook or Entourage) although this won't stop your mobile device from being flooded if you have push email service.
Hope this helps someone!