Outlook 2003′s Junk Mail filter

Junk Mail updates are released monthly. If you aren’t using automatic updates,  go to Help, Check for updates once a month.

New to Microsoft Outlook since version 2003: Junk Email handling. Junk email removes spam from your mailbox using built-in filtering capabilities. The junk mail feature is highly accurate when set on High and you can add specific addresses or domains to the Safe Senders, Safe Recipients, and Blocked Senders lists. To view the options, open Tools, Options, Junk Email settings.

We’re seeing a lot of queries in the forums where people are creating rules to delete spam and adding hundreds, if not thousands, of domains to the Blocked senders list. It’s an awful lot of work to create rules that do what Outlook 2003’s junk filter already does very well.

Best practices for Outlook’s Junk email filter include:

• Setting it on High and moving mail to the Junk Email folder.
• Disable the option to “Trust mail from my Contacts” on the Safe Senders tab—if you have a contact for yourself any spam sent with your address in the from field will be trusted.
• If mailing lists are caught by the junk filter, add their address to the Safe Recipients list.
• You shouldn’t need too many addresses on the Blocked Senders lists and won’t need to import a huge list immediately. My blocked sender list contains one address—the address of a person who likes to forward me a lot of junk.

Every few days, take a few moments to scan the junk mail folder for false positives—something you can do while waiting on hold while making phone calls. Once scanned, right click on it and choose Empty Junk Email. After you add newsletter addresses to the Safe senders list, you’ll find few false positives, but I don’t recommend setting it to delete messages immediately.

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Tags: email, filters, junk mail

This article is filed under How to..., Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010.
Last reviewed on Aug 9, 2011