Tammy asked me about the “Junk E-mail” folder that she noticed when she installed Microsoft Outlook 2007 recently. Today we will all take a look.
The “Junk E-mail” folder is another form of spam protection for your e-mail. For you newbies out there, spam is the term widely used for unsolicited e-mail. This e-mail usually has a plan to get money out of your pocket into someone else’s. Think of it as regular postal mail that you receive addressed to “Occupant”. Spam is most times sent simultaneously to hundreds or even millions of inboxes and can sometimes contain viruses.
This junk filter is turned on by default with the protection level set to “Low”. This level is supposed to catch only the most obvious spam messages. You can make the filter more aggressive, but if you do it may sometimes remove legitimate messages. Any message that is caught by the Junk E-mail Filter is moved to a special Junk E-mail folder. Before deleting messages from this folder you should review them to make sure that genuine messages that you need didn’t end up there (bad illustration below). To delete them just right click on the Junk E-mail folder. Once deleted you cannot get them back.
There are two parts to the Junk E-mail Filter: Junk E-mail Filter Lists create by Microsoft and technology developed by their researchers that evaluates if an unread message should be treated as a junk e-mail message or not. This evaluation is based on several factors, including the time the message was sent and the content of the message. The filter does not single out any individual e-mail message. The filter is based on the content of the message in general and uses “advanced analysis of the message structure to determine the probability” that a particular e-mail message is spam.
To make you Junk E-Mail suit your needs, while in Outlook, go to Tools / Options / Preferences and then click the Junk E-Mail button. Just be careful you don’t set it too aggressively or you may miss e-mail that you need…read on.
An example and a personal plea here. I looked in my Junk E-mail folder recently and found 75-100 emails. I chose to delete them after a very quick visual scan. Right as I clicked delete I saw an email from one of you that mentioned something about your wireless internet. The name had “William(s)” in it. If that was you, email me again and I will make sure to look for it. So don’t be mad at me if I occasionally don’t respond to your emails, try again and then yell at Bill Gates the next time you see him.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 5:15 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
