Office 2007 Bible

Understanding Junk E-Mail Filtering

Junk e-mail filtering works on two principles. The first is the content of the message; certain keywords and phrases are considered likely to be spam. The other is the identity of the sender. You can define a safe list—people whose messages are never treated as spam regardless of content. Likewise, you can define a blocked list—people whose messages are always treated as spam regardless of content. In either case, messages that Outlook flags as spam are placed in the Junk E-Mail folder rather than the Inbox.

Why doesn’t Outlook just delete spam messages? The fact is that content-based spam filtering is not perfect, and legitimate messages are sometimes caught as spam. Some people like to quickly scan their Junk E-Mail folder before permanently deleting the messages just to make sure that a legitimate message has not been caught. However, if you want spam to be deleted automatically, you can tell Outlook to do this. See the next section, “Setting Junk E-Mail Options,” for details.

Third-Party Anti-Spam Software Several anti-spam programs are on the market that work in conjunction with Outlook to catch spam. These programs may provide more sophisticated filtering options and other features. If you are using one of these programs, you may want to turn Outlook’s spam filtering off. You do not have to, however; leaving it on does no harm and may in fact catch spam that the other program misses.