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Outlook 2003 fights the spam battle

David Coursey AnchorDesk

Published: 22 Oct 2003 10:25 BST

Without getting into the specifics, Microsoft has already looked at millions of spam and non-spam emails and created a filtering mechanism based on some 100,000 variables. This filter is installed as part of Outlook and used to score each incoming message for its spam potential. Cross a certain threshold and the message goes to the spam folder.

Outlook provides two threshold settings: low and high. The default setting is low, which is a good place to run the filter for the first week or two. During this time you will see more spam, but the chances of a false positive trashing a non-spam message are reduced.

While in "low" mode, you can check the spam folder occasionally and add senders who triggered a false positive to your safe senders list. This is especially important for any mailing lists you're on. I was, however, pleasantly surprised that many commercial messages that I actually wanted to receive didn't trigger the spam filter at all.

After a week or two in "low" mode, switch to "high" and you should start seeing the 95 percent or better effectiveness that I've enjoyed. For example, this past Thursday, Outlook sent 264 messages to my junk mail folder. Of those, none were false positives and Outlook allowed only six messages through to my inbox that I considered to be blockable spam. There were also a couple of messages without any content that were apparently being used to verify my email address that also got through.

I've been researching Microsoft's anti-spam technology and will report back next Monday more specifically on how it works and how the company plans to stay ahead of spammers' efforts to defeat it.

Two other aspects of Microsoft's war on spam should be of particular interest to AnchorDesk readers: One is a feature that allows you to add an entire domain to the safe senders list. This matters for newsletters (like ours) that don't appear to come from a single address, but rather from different addresses within a single domain. The new Outlook can accept mail from that domain, so your newsletters get through.

Microsoft has also added a default feature for preventing HTML email from being displayed. Besides preventing porn from showing up in your email, it also keeps people from using server-side HTML images to "spy" on whether you opened the email or not.