Spam blocking is not a ‘one size fits all’ affair, despite what some anti-spam proponents will have you believe.
Outlook 2003 has a Junk Mail filter and we get mixed reports on its effectiveness. Some people think it’s great (usually on the High setting) while others think it’s lousy. Part of that gap in satisfaction is because each person’s amount of incoming spam, tolerance for it and type of legitimate email is different.
Spam blocking is not a ‘one size fits all’ affair, despite what some anti-spam proponents will have you believe. Reading many product promos and reviews that pass our desk you’d be forgiven for thinking there was a simple solution to spam – it ain’t so – if such a magic bullet did exist we would not have the current spam problem.
CHEAP SOFTWARE SCAMS
Among spammers there’s trends and fads, and I’m not getting so many offers to enlarge my bodily parts these days, but I am getting more and more offers for cheap software – especially Microsoft Office and Symantec products.
Most offers are quite primitive but some look a bit more sincere – we’ve seen one that’s a decent copy of a familiar Amazon product page. Naturally it has nothing to do with Amazon.
Please, I beg of you, just delete these offers without a second thought.
Even if you did get something in the mail for your money, it’s certain to be an illegal copy. More likely your money would disappear into someone’s laughing pockets never to be seen again.
Over the years, we’ve heard from people who have paid money to these con-artists and get angry when they get some obviously pirated CD’s. Amazingly their anger isn’t at the retailer, but rather they blame Microsoft! We’ve had emails from people who expect Microsoft to make good their loss. As you know, we’re always ready to blame Microsoft when they get things wrong – but the gullibility of a shopper isn’t their fault.
It stands to reason that if someone unknown to you offers eg. Office Professional upgrade for $50 when it retails for $330, then there’s something screwy going on.
If you believe stories about it being unwanted stock, a sale from a bankrupt business or whatever – then we have some bridges in select locations around the world that we can offer at reasonable rates.
I say it again – don’t be tempted, just delete the messages and move on.
QUICKER JUNK
For Outlook 2003 users there’s one way to customize the program to recognize new types of spam. You have the option to add a name or domain to a Blocked Senders list. To do this is clumsy but there is a faster way to mark and remove unwanted spam, and here’s how.
- Open Outlook 2003, choose Tools | Customize
- Choose the Commands tab
- Scroll down the categories list until you find Actions
- Then scroll down the Commands list until you find ‘Add Sender to Blocked Senders list’
- Click on that entry and drag it to a place on the Outlook toolbar. I place it next to the Delete icon, but it’s up to you.
- Right click on the long text now on the toolbar and choose Name.
- Shorten the text to something you will understand. I have it as simply ‘ &Junk ‘ the & symbol is optional.
- You can have a text label, an icon or both. I have both.
- Choose from the right-click menu ‘Image and Text ‘
- Then ‘Change Button image ‘ and select an image – I used the frowning face. There’s options to make your own icon if you have the time and inclination.
- When you’re finished, click Close on the Customize dialog box. Note: the Customize dialog must be open all the time you’re changing the toolbar.
Now, when you click on your newly made button the selected message will be removed to the Junk Mail folder and any future messages from that sender would go to the same place automatically.
BUT THERE’S MORE
If the above tip was on the Microsoft web site or some other place that is afraid to annoy the Redmond gods, that would be the end of it. What sets Woody’s Watch apart is this next bit where we tell you the shortcomings of the tip and Outlook generally. Usually you’d have to find this out for yourself, but we believe in letting you know everything we’ve found out.
It’s fairly useless
The really bad news is that, as a precaution against more spam, the above tip is fairly useless. Spammers quickly adapted to Outlook 2003 and rarely use the same FROM address twice. It may help to remove duplicate spam you get as part of the same mailing run (for example to email aliases you use) but that’s all. In our experience over the last few months there’s been no noticeable reduction in spam as a result of this technique.
But it can’t hurt and clicking an icon is certainly faster than using the right-click menu.
Junk or Delete
Putting your Junk button next to delete is convenient but can be dangerous. Make sure you don’t hit Junk when you meant to Delete which is easy to do when going through a pile of messages. If you do that, you won’t see future messages from that person.
Domains too?
Eagle eyed readers will know that as well as blocking a single sender ( fred@dagg.com ) you can also block an entire domain ( @dagg.com ). For reasons best known to the gods, there’s no button to do that. You can add an address or domain to the Safe Senders list, but only add a single address to the Blocked Senders list.
To block an entire domain, you have to go to Junk Mail options and manually add it to the Blocked Senders list. This is what passes for customer convenience at Microsoft.
Yes, you could write some VBA code to do that but then you have the problem of macro security, speed of execution etc. Wouldn’t it have been better for Microsoft to have done a more thoughtful job in the first place?
