MS-Word / Getting Started

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Reduce Spam in Outlook

If you have an e-mail account, you will get spam, that unwanted e-mail that clogs millions of inboxes every day with obnoxious offers for mortgage refinancing, low-cost prescription drugs, or celebrity pornography. Unless you actually enjoy deleting these messages manually, you can use Outlook to filter your e-mail for you.

Setting up Outlook's junk e-mail filter

Outlook can either color-code suspected spam or move it to a special junk e-mail folder automatically. Because Outlook looks for keywords in spam, be aware that it will never be 100 percent effective in identifying spam, but it can identify the more blatant spam and save you time from deleting the messages yourself. To turn on Outlook's spam filter, follow these steps:

1. Choose Go> Mail or press Ctrl+1. Outlook displays the Mail and Inbox panes and then Choose Tools> Options. The Options dialog box appears.
2. Click the Junk E-mail button. The Junk E-mail Options dialog box appears and then select one of the following radio buttons:

   No Automatic Filtering:
   Turns off the Outlook spam filter.
   
   Low:
   Identifies and moves most obvious spam to the Junk E-mail folder.
   
   High:
   Identifies and moves nearly all spam into the Junk E-mail folder along with some regular e-mail messages, too, so check the Junk E-mail folder periodically to look for valid messages.

3. Click OK. The Options dialog box appears again and in the end click OK.

Creating a Safe Senders list

A Safe Senders list lets you define all the e-mail addresses you want to accept messages from, and Outlook routes all e-mail from other e-mail addresses directly to your Junk E-mail folder.

The advantage of a Safe Senders list is that it guarantees you will never receive spam. On the down side, though, it also guarantees that if someone tries to contact you whose e-mail address does not appear on your Safe Senders list, you will never get that valid message, either.

To create a Safe Senders list, follow Steps 1 through 3 in the preceding section, "Setting up Outlook's junk email filter" to display the Junk E-mail Options dialog box. Then follow these steps:

1. In the Junk E-mail Options dialog box, click the Options tab and then Select the Safe Lists Only radio button.
2. Click the Safe Senders tab. The Safe Sender's tab of the Junk E-mail Options dialog box appears.
3. (Optional) Select (or clear) the Also Trust E-mail from My Contacts check box. Selecting this check box tells Outlook that if you store someone's e-mail address in your Contacts list, you will also accept e-mail from that person, too.
4. (Optional) Select (or clear) the Automatically Add People We E-mail to the Safe Senders List check box. This tells Outlook that if you send e-mail to someone, you will accept his or her messages in return.
5. (Optional) Click the Add button. The Add Address or Domain dialog box appears.
6. Type a complete e-mail address. (Or type a domain name - for example, if you trust everyone from Hotmail.com to send you valid e-mail, type @hotmail.com in this dialog box.) and click OK.
7. Repeat Steps 5-6 for each additional e-mail address or domain you want to add.
8. Click OK until all the dialog boxes disappear.

Creating a Blocked Senders list

If a particular e-mail address persists in sending you spam, you can choose to selectively block that single e-mail address or domain. To create a Blocked Senders list, follow section, "Setting up Outlook's junk email filter" to display the Junk E-mail Options dialog box. Then follow these steps:

1. In the Junk E-mail Options dialog box, select the Safe Lists Only radio button and then click the Blocked Senders tab. The Blocked Senders tab of the Junk E-mail Options dialog box appears.
2. Click the Add button. The Add E-mail Address or Domain dialog box appears (which looks just like the Add Address or Domain dialog box).
3. Type an e-mail address or domain name and then click OK. The Options dialog box appears again and then click OK until all the dialog boxes disappear.