Realizing you have a spam problem does not mean you went on some forbidden website or have compromised your email security. The people who use spam to try to get you to come to their web sites or to buy something are pretty clever. They buy email addresses from people and have other ways of hacking or finding out your email address without you ever giving it to them. So do not feel that you are being personally targeted by spam. If you get an spam email, that was probably part of a mass broadcast of that advertisement to tens of thousands of email addresses that spammers try to get to in hopes that a few "suckers" will be taken in and fall for their schemes.

The battle against spam seems to be an endless one. The things you can do seem to work for a while and then somehow things change and the spammers start getting through to you again. You can buy software that is supposed to control it. But what we don't see is that there is a continuous battle of wits going on between people who seem to insist on sending out spam and those who are making money stopping it. Each time spammers come up with some new trick or tactic to get their emails to your inbox, the anti-spam people come out with a "new and improved" product to stop it, which of course, you have to buy.

But that just seems to excite the spammers who have endless patience and technical savvy to figure out around the latest blocks and get through again. And so the cycle continues to repeat and the only ones who seem to be doing well in this ugly battle are the people you pay for anti-spam software. You would almost suspect that they are cooperating in the cycle because it sure does line their pockets each time you have to upgrade your spam software to block the latest waves of spam.

But the confusion and the burden of spam doesn't just end with having to spend your hard earned money on software to stop it. Once you get the software, you have to "train" it. Software designed to stop spam has to somehow know the difference between spam and good emails. If your spam software is too "aggressive", it can end up filtering out emails you need and want which can be even more of a problem than the spam in the first place.

So your installation of the software has to learn from you what key words you want to block that it might "see" in the message box or the body of an email message. Often there is a "blocked list" where you can add any email addresses that send you spam and the software will filter them out and send them to the deleted emails folder or a special folder just for spam. It keeps that special folder so you can quickly scan what it puts there before deleting anything in case the software made any mistakes.

The result is that in exchange for spam "protection,", you get a new hobby of constantly finding new email address that are being used to send you spam and adding them to the blocked list. Spammers know this trick and it seems they can create new email addresses faster than you can add the old ones to the blocked list. Blocking on dirty words or certain key words like "Viagra" or "get rich quick" is also somewhat effective but not totally because as soon as spammers figure out what you are doing, they change their strategies and get their spam to you.

You add to that the daily chore of reviewing the "spam folder' where the bad emails were sent to make sure nothing valid went there and you really have not eliminated the problem of spam. You have just organized it into a bunch of habits you have to be in every day to constantly battle the flood of spam coming your way. It is pretty maddening especially when you consider you have to pay the spam software companies for the privilege of constantly training their software to do a so-so job for you. You wonder sometimes who is training who.

There has to be a better way. And in fact, there is a better way that not only is free, it is effective because it reduces the amount of "maintenance" you have to do tremendously. You still must take a few steps each week to keep this system working but it is a slick, simple and effective way to cycle all spam to trash and keep all of your good email isolated. It is so simple that you will wonder why you didn't think of it yourself. Here is how it works.

A New Way of Seeing Email

The problem is we have been looking at this problem all wrong. The approach we just reviewed is based on an assumption that we must fight all bad email from getting into our inbox by pushing it to a quarantine box. So you get into that constant battle of figuring out the originating email address and adding it to the "blocked senders" list so your software can catch that sender and send that email to the designated folder. Then the spammers change their email addresses and the fight is new all over again the next day.

Obviously, the fight to keep your inbox full of only pure emails is a losing one. Like many problems of this nature, maybe instead of trying to find new ways to fight the battle, we need to change the terms of the fight to give the advantage to you and me. The heart of that new approach lies in one basic question which is …

What is so Holy About that Inbox?

Instead of fighting to push all bad email to a quarantine box, what if we changed the way we saw the battle over email. Instead, what if we "quarantined" good email and let the spammers have the inbox? This is a far more controlled approach and if you implement it correctly, you can put this solution in place with no extra software to buy and very little effort. You just have to use a tool that is…

Right Under Your Nose

There is actually some anti-spam tools built right into most email software such as Microsoft Outlook. In fact, you may be already using one of the most effective tools for managing spam that is not really identified as a spam tool. It is the facility Outlook gives you to route email to email folders you create based on keywords or email addresses. So you can identify all of the email addresses from your family and as soon as they arrive, Outlook can put those in a "family" folder so you know what they are.

This is a terrific feature especially if you get a lot of emails. You can have your newsletter subscriptions go to one email folder, work related emails to another and emails from family and friends to another and keep things straight like this. But this is a tool that can very easily become a foolproof spam protection system that doesn't cost a dime beyond what you paid for your email software. It works every day and on every email and it reduces your spam maintenance from a constant daily hobby to an every once in a while maintenance step. Here is how it works.

• Create a new folder in your email system. Just call it "Good Email" or something similar so you know that this is to become the new holding tank for all the emails you value.
• Now use that tool that allows you to route emails to a selected folder based on email address. Look at every routine email you get that could be considered legitimate. Now add each of those emails to a new email "rule" that routes those emails to the "Good Email" folder that you just created.
• Instantly your inbox becomes the spam quarantine and all good emails are kept in one guarded email folder that you have total control over. Now all you have to do is quickly glance at your old inbox to make sure no new good emails show up there. As soon as you find an email from a new person or company that you want to hear from, you move it to the "Good Email" folder and it is safe.
• When you do identify a new email recipient that you want to add to your elite list of allowed emails, along with moving the new email to the "Good Email" folder, you just open the rule that filters your emails and add that one new email address to the list. From then on out, emails from that sender will always go to your protected folder.
• Each day and maybe each time you check emails, you will see spam "trapped" in your inbox. A quick glance confirms it is all spam. Then with a quick "select all" and delete, the spam goes away, just that easy and just that quick.

The maintenance of adding new email contacts to the allowed senders list will be something you will be doing with some regularity in the first few weeks you have this system in place. But before long, most if not all of your allowed email senders will be on your allowed senders list. Then you just have to add new people on an "as needed" basis. Checking for spam is a task that just takes a few seconds because you know almost everything in your email inbox is spam. And you just delete it all and you are spam free again.

It is a system that is amazingly effective considering how simple it is. You can have it in place in moments and forget about paying subscriptions for spam filtering products. You save money, time and a lot of frustration. And above all, this very simple and inexpensive system is fool proof, it works every time without fail and it accomplishes what all the fancy and expensive software says they will do but they cannot do. It gives control over your email back to you and keeps that control in your hands forever. That is good spam control for sure.

This is the original image. See the following edited images to know the effects.

Colored Pencil: Important edges are retained and given a rough crosshatch appearance with this; the solid background color shows through the smoother areas.

This is edited with colored pencil effect. Filters->Artistic-> Colored Pencil

Cutout: It portrays an image as though it were made from roughly cut-out pieces of colored paper.

Cutout

Dry Brush: It simplifies an image by reducing its range of colors to areas of common color.

Dry Brush

Film grain: It applies an even pattern to the shadow tones and midtones of an image.

Film Grain

Fresco: It paints an image in coarse style using short rounded and hastily applied dabs.

Fresco

Neon Glow: This adds various types of glows to the objects in an image and is useful for colorizing an image while softening its look

Neon Glow with green color

Paint Daubs: It allows you choose from various brush sizes from 1 to 50 and types for painterly effects. Brush types include simple, light rough, light dark, wide sharp, wide blurry and sparkle.

Paint Daubs with simple brush

Palette Knife: It reduces detail in image to give the effect of a thinly painted canvas that reveals the texture underneath.

Palette Knife

Plastic Wrap: It coats the image in shiny plastic, accentuating the surface detail.

Plastic Wrap

Poster Edges: It reduces the number of colors in an image according posterization option you set. Large broad areas of the images have simple shading, while fine dark detail is distributed throughout the image.

Poster Edges

Rough Pastels: It makes an image appear is if stroked with colored pastel chalk on a textured background. In areas of bright color, the chalk appears thick with little texture: in darker areas, the chalk appears scraped off reveal the texture.

Rough Pastels

Smudge Stick: It softens an image using short diagonal strokes to smudge the darker areas of the images. Lighter areas become brighter and lose detail.

Smudge Stick

Sponge: It creates images with highly textured areas of contrasting color, appearing to have been painted with a sponge.

Sponge

Underpainting: It paints an image on a textured background, and then paints the final image over it.

Underpainting

Watercolor: It paints the image water color style, simplifying details in an image using a medium brush loaded with water and color.

Watercolor

1. Open up a new flash document.
2. Select the rectangle tool and look at the options in the tools panel and select "Set corner radius":
3. Set the corner radius to 10 and press OK
4. Draw a black rectangle on the stage with no outline, it will be rounded
5. Edit the rectangle via the properties panel and make the width 100 and the height 30: (The position doesn't matter)
6. Open up the color mixer panel, if you don't have it, then press SHIFT+F9:

   

7. Select the rectangle with the selection tool and at the "Type" drop down menu in the color mixer panel, select linear and make sure that the "Fill" in the color mixer is selected not the stroke (To select the "Fill", simply click on the bucket in the color mixer panel):
8. Change the gradient at the colour mixer to look like this (You can click and drag the tabs to move them):




9. Your rectangle should look something like this:
10. That looks alright doesn't it? Lets make it better, select the Gradient Transform Tool (Hotkey F):
11. Click on the rectangle with the tool and it should look like this:
12. Move your mouse to the top right corner of the rectangle and the mouse cursor should turn into a rotate symbol
13. Rotate the gradient 90 degrees anti-clockwise, it should look like this now:
14. Now, that arrow pointing to the right, click on it and drag it down until it meets the edge of the actual rectangle:
15. Convert the shape to a button using the F8 key and name it button:
16. Now you have a button, double click to go inside it
17. While inside the button click on the shape and convert it to a movie clip. Name it ButtonInside:
18. Click on your newly made movie clip that is inside your button and double click on it AGAIN
19. Convert the content into another movie clip (Last one I swear) name it ButtonInside2.
20. Now go back to the inside of ButtonInside (You should be here: Scene 1 > Button > ButtonInside), go down to the properties panel and click on Filters:
21. In the filters tab, click on the "+" and then click on Glow:
22. Now, there are many different filters so later on you can experiment with them but for now, let's use the glow filter
23. Edit the properties of the filter to look like this:
24. Add a keyframe while inside ButtonInside at frame 10 and frame 20:
    
25. At keyframe 10, select the movie clip that you just applied the "Glow" filter to and go to the filters tab
26. Change the properties of "Glow" to look like this:
27. Apply motion tweens to the 1st and 2nd keyframe and the 2nd and 3rd keyframe:
28. Go back to the stage and test your movie
29. You will see that the button has an animated glow. So far this button is good but it can be better.
30. Double click on the button in the stage so that you are inside the Button symbol:
31. Copy the movie clip in layer 1 of the button, don't paste it yet
32. Make another layer and place that layer on top of "Layer 1" and name it "Bevel"
33. Select the "Bevel" layer and push CONTROL+SHIFT+V. This will paste whatever you copied in the location in your current layer.
34. Select the object you just pasted if it isn't already selected and press CONTROL + B. This will break the movie clip apart, since the movie clip you just broke apart had an instance of the ButtonInside2 movieclip in it the movieclip on stage now will be the ButtonInside2. The "Break apart" function is great for many things. Like for example: You make a movie clip with a square. You want to make another movie clip with it but you spent a while drawing that square. So you break the movie clip apart back into the ungrouped form and make another symbol with it!
35. Anyways back on task, the broken apart movie clip is now the ButtonInside2 movie clip. You will realize it has a "glow" filter applied to it already. Delete that filter by selecting the "Glow" filter and pressing the "-" button next to the + button:
36. Add a "Bevel" filter to it:
37. Make the properties of the bevel look like this:
38. Bevel gives it a nice “3D” look. Now add a keyframe at the "Down" state of the button in the bevel layer and add frames to match it in the other layer:
39. At the "Down" state of the button in the "Bevel" layer, select the instance of the movie clip
40. Go to the filters tab
41. There should already be a "bevel" filter added from before, if not then you've done something wrong
42. Edit the properties of the bevel and change it to look like this
43. Return to the stage
44. Test your movie, while testing it, click on the button. You will see it looks like it has been pressed down.
45. Exit out of the testing screen and back to the stage
46. Right now it looks good but for the sake of learning, I will tell you how to apply alpha to it
47. Click on the button while at the stage, at the properties panel, look for "Colour". When you find it, select "Alpha":
48. Next to the alpha, set the % to 50:
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49. You will see that the button has faded a bit. Alpha is for transparency, the 50% that you entered means the object is 50% transparent. 0% means that the entire object is transparent and 100% means it is not transparent at all.
50. Congratulations, you have gained knowledge of colours, gradients and filters. You can experiment around with those I will now leave you with a few notes.

NOTES:

• Linear is not the only type of gradient
• You can have alpha in colours
• You can have alpha in gradients
• The gradient transform tool isn't the only way to alter gradients
• You can have more than one filter