To paraphrase Nietzsche, even the gods themselves struggle in vain against spam. Like al Qaeda terrorists, spamorrists have shown Darwinian survival traits in adapting to and defeating efforts to shield our inboxes from spam. Fortunately, a lot of it is easy to spot and mass-delete. But what about those "OMG You Must Read And Pass This Along" messages from your friends, acquaintances and business contacts.

Your e-mail filters can be a great ally in helping you manage these kinds of messages, whose senders you don't want (or possibly, can't afford) to block forever. And maybe you do want to read the message, but just don't want it glaring at you from the inbox.

It takes some experimentation with your particular e-mail application, but generally it's possible to set it up to handle many of these messages automatically.

Your e-mail application should have some kind of filter or rules function that lets you select specific words, e-mail addresses, sender names or combinations of those. You can designate whether the filter should look at the subject, sender or body of the e-mail.

Further, you can tell the filter to check if the locations contain/do not contain, begin/end with any or all of the criteria you set.

Example: Let's say I have a friend named Spike who daily sends me a column by a writer I dislike, but read because it is sometimes informative. I just don't want to read it immediately. I can set my e-mail filter as follows:

Rule: SpikeColumn

if ALL of the following conditions are met:

FROM CONTAINS spike@buffy.net

MESSAGE BODY CONTAINS Heloise

Perform the following actions:

MOVE MESSAGE TO HOUSEHOLD HINTS FOLDER

I specified that all those conditions had to be met in order to move only the "Heloise" email to the Household Hints folder, because Spike sends me other messages that I do need to read promptly. If I had said any, all of Spike's messages would wind up there.

Again, depending on your e-mail app, the filters or rules will allow you to set multiple criteria to further refine the screening process. They can assign priorities, automatically reply to or forward messages, and of course, delete them.

A little practice will enable you to set up a filter in almost no time, and could save you much more time and aggravation in dealing with an overflowing inbox.