The August 2007 spam update for Outlook doesn’t keep pace with fast moving spammers and phishers.
In the August bundle of updates for Windows and Office is an update to the Junk Email Definitions for Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. This particular update barely keeps up with the latest developments in spam.
Spammers are changing their emails and tactics on an almost daily basis – junk email definitions quickly become obsolete and won’t recognize the latest spam incarnations for what they really are.
It’s not that the update doesn’t work – it does – but the update doesn’t deal with fairly straight-forward variations on spam. For example spam about ‘ecard’ or ‘postcard’ where a ” Friend / Classmate / Nephew has created a …” with a web link using an IP address instead of name. Many of these messages are left in the Inbox while others are correctly considered ‘Junk’ and placed in the appropriate folder.
Most likely the Junk E-mail update takes too long to get through Microsoft’s internal systems before being made public. That lag time means the spam definitions are out-of-date before they’re even released.
Similarly, we’re noticing more phishing messages getting past the Outlook 2007 phishing protection.
Microsoft needs to speed up the update process to keep pace with the spammers and phishers. Tardy updates every month or two are not enough these days.
Microsoft’s paying customers deserve better or they have another reason to dump MS Office in favor of a cheaper alternative. There are web based email clients that do a much better spam filtering job than paying for Outlook.
See Also
- Spam filter update for Outlook 2003
- Do you have the latest Junk Email filter?
- Outlook isn’t catching ‘CNN.com Daily Top 10’ phishing trap
