How to stop your Office Watch newsletters going to the Junk E-mail folder.
To make sure your Office Watch newsletters don’t end up in your Junk Email folder you need to set us up as a ‘Safe Sender’. Here’s how to do that in Outlook.
Keep in mind that Outlook software is NOT the primary spam filter anymore. Almost all email filtering is done by your mail host before it reaches email software.
If you look at a mailing from Office Watch you’ll see the From address:
From: Office Watch <[email protected]>
Setup the address [email protected] as the ‘Safe Sender’.
(Our From address was ‘[email protected]’ for many years. We retained the ‘woodyswatch.com’ domain because many of our readers and filters set for that domain and we didn’t want to inconvenience thousands of people with a change. Anti-spam filters increasingly scored against our emails because of the two different domain names in use. At the start of 2020, we were forced to switchover.)
To make it easier for our readers we have the one ‘From’ address for all the email newsletters.
To do this in Outlook for Windows or Mac go to Actions | Junk E-mail | Junk E-mail Options | Safe Senders then ‘Add’. Type in the From address exactly as shown.
In Outlook 365 right-click on a message and choose Junk.
Then choose either:
- Never Block Sender
OR, better - Never Block Sender’s Domain
‘Never Block Sender’s Domain’ will allow messages from any address using that domain. In our case, that means Outlook will allow the email newsletter, order confirmations or other email exchanges with us.
Add to Contacts list
Outlook has an option (under Actions | Junk E-mail | Junk E-mail Options | Safe Senders) to automatically add all email addresses in your Contacts list to the Safe Senders list.
Savvy Outlook users add newsletter addresses to their Contacts list because it’s more portable. If you move to a new computer (depending on how you do it) your old ‘Safe Senders’ list might not be copied across. But your Contacts list (contained in the PST file / OST with all the other Outlook data) will be copied.
Just create a new Contact with the email address [email protected] in the Email field.
It’s a good idea to add a note to explain why the contact was created.
Separating the newsletters
Now you’ve made sure that Office Watch newsletters aren’t considered spam, you might want to trigger actions or colors for individual newsletters:
- Office Watch
- Office for Mere Mortals
- Office Watch for Apple
We’ve made that easy by some consistent formatting in the From name. The name of the newsletter is always in the From line so you can set an action or color formatting according to that.
For example, in Rules Wizard the condition “with specific words in the sender’s address” and the exact name of the newsletter (from the list above).
For other spam filters
The important point for the setup of any anti-spam filter is to make sure the From or Senders address in the white-list (aka Safe Senders, Permitted Senders etc) is correct.
For all the Office Watch newsletters use the address: [email protected]
