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Outlook 2003 fights the spam battle

David Coursey AnchorDesk

Published: 22 Oct 2003 10:25 BST

I can think of only one really good reason why the average Microsoft Office user should upgrade to the 2003 version, which goes on sale this week. Fortunately, it's concerning the application most of us spend the most time with each day: Outlook.

The best new feature in Outlook is something you won't see, but which you'll know is there because of something else you won't see. I'm talking about the new Outlook junk-mail filter, which in my informal testing has done an exceptional job of ridding my inbox of spam.

I've been using Outlook 2003 as my default email client, on multiple machines, for more than a month. I like it enough that I've uninstalled the rest of my anti-spam arsenal. That includes third-party applications as well as services, which I found effective but difficult for both sender and recipient to use, not to mention expensive.

When set in "high" blocking mode, the Outlook filter has been something like 95 percent effective in sending spam to my junk-mail folder instead of my inbox. More importantly, the filter is 100 percent effective in blocking pornographic spam containing pictures. Your results may vary, depending on how much mail you get and how much of it is junk. But that's as good a block rate as any spam filter I've seen that doesn't require all senders to register themselves onto a "white list" of authenticated email addresses.

Also, the Microsoft Outlook filter comes with the program and doesn't cost extra. Perhaps the one thing that angers me most about spam is the prospect of paying $50 (£30) or more each year for a filtering service.

Because the spam filtering is built into Outlook, I don't have to install a separate application. In the past, this hasn't been so much a compatibility problem as a bother. But anytime I don't have to install something extra, I consider it a win for system stability.

Microsoft's spam filter doesn't work like most of the standalone products I've seen. While you can add senders to the safe list (which by default already includes your Outlook contact list) and also block addresses that send you spam, the system doesn't attempt to learn from the mail you mark as "spam" and "not spam."