Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and most other email programs allow you to create "rules" to automatically process emails based on subject lines, senders and recipients.

These rules are extremely helpful in dealing with spam and "splatter". Splatter is the industry term for undeliverable email notices you receive when a spammer uses your email address to send out spam. These are not email messages you sent, these are email messages sent by a spammer who "forged" your email address as the sender of their messages.

How and why spammers forge email addresses is covered in this article.

CommerceStreet.com's Premium Spam Filtering Service marks spam email messages with Spam!_ and Spam?_ in the subject line. Information about these markers is provided with your spam filter setup information.

Splatter emails have characteristic subject lines, which include "delivery failed", "returned mail", etc.

You can setup rules in Outlook (and other email programs) to move Spam?_ and splatter messages to your Junk Email folder, where you can quickly review the messages and delete them.

To add a rule in Outlook (and Outlook Express):

1. right click on an email message and select "Create Rule" from the pop-up menu
2. Check "Subject contains" and enter Spam?_ or some other filtering criteria in the text box.
3. Check "Move the item to folder" and click the "Select Folder" button.
4. Highlight the "Junk E-mail" folder and click "OK"

There are important reasons to move messages to the junk email folder instead of deleting them.

1. Sometimes, rules do not work the way you expect and unintended emails are filtered out. If they move to the junk mail folder, you can review what is filtered and recover messages inappropriately filtered. If you simply delete messages, you can not see what your rule actually filtered, and you may not be able to recover messages you did not mean to filter out.
2. Messages marked with Spam?_ are questionable messages, there will be some false positives in these messages. These messages are intended for your review before deletion.
3. Some "bounce back" messages may actually be messages YOU sent, which could not be delivered to the intended recipient for some reason. You would normally want to see bounce messages, unless you are having trouble with splatter.  

If you use one of these other mail programs, please contact the program vendor for instructions on creating rules.