Using English at Work：11 Checking Mail,Email,and Voicemail(4)（在线收听）

Another word for "junk mail" when we're talking about email is "spam."

At my house, most of the junk mail I get are advertisements that I don't want, so I throw them away without even reading them.

At the office, I spend a few minutes sorting through the junk mail.

"To sort" means to put things in order, or to divide things into different groups or categories.

In this case, I'm separating the junk mail from the mail I really want to read.

You might, for example, sort your clothes by color, or you might sort your papers in alphabetical order from A to Z.

After sorting through my junk mail, I turn on my computer to check email.

I open my email program and my new messages automatically download into my inbox.

"To download" means to copy a file from the Internet or a large network computer onto your own computer.

Many people like to download music or videos from the Internet.

My email gets downloaded from the company's large computer servers into my inbox, the electronic space for new messages that I need to read.

I have a pretty good spam filter.

A "spam filter" is usually part of your email program that keeps, or prevents, spam - unwanted emails - from coming into your email inbox.

We say the spam filter "traps" a lot of emails for advertisements and other things I never asked for.

"To trap," here, means to get, to hold, and not to let go so that you don't see them when you open your inbox.

Sometimes a spam filter is too high and it puts emails that want to see into the trash or spam folder by accident or by mistake.

We talk about a spam filter being "high," that means it's trapping too many messages.

That's why I still check through my trash folder carefully to make sure nothing important was trapped or filtered out.