Dealing with Spam in Outlook
Plastering your email address on your website, blog, and other places almost guarantees spam. And once it starts flooding in, it seems to get exponentially worse. I was tired of Outlook's Junk Email Filter not stepping up to the challenge. Lots of junk got through, and I didn't want to sit there marking individual email addresses to block. Very unscaleable...
I thought about switching completely to my Mac Mail client. And I toyed around with Thunderbird. Both email programs get trained on what you think is spam, through an algorithm called Bayesian Filtering made famous by Paul Graham. (btw, Paul Graham writes some really good stuff for web geeks - today's for example)
Back to my problem with Outlook 07... a few months ago, I installed SpamBayes which also uses the same algorithm. After a few weeks of training where I marked messages as Spam, the problem is significantly gone. I'd guess 99% of spam doesn't make it to my Inbox.
SpamBayes is open-source (ie free). If you're using another effective tool, let us know about it. Here are some screenshots of what SpamBayes looks like in my Outlook 2007:
Update on 10/12/07: James and others insist in the comments that Gmail should completely replace Outlook :)
I use a 'dummy' gmail account which works really well.
I forward/pop at leastfive different accounts into the gmail account and then just pop the one account into thunderbird, as in: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006035.html
I've found the gmail spam filters excellent. And the benefit of a backup is great. And if your set gmail to be able to send from the accounts as well (very easy), you can use your gmail account on the road when you don't have your laptop to hand.
Posted by: James | October 05, 2007 at 02:31 PM
Cool hack James!
Posted by: joe | October 05, 2007 at 05:15 PM
I got a simpler solution ...
... it's called gmail.
Excellent spam filtering. You can even forward messages to outlook of you must.
Posted by: Mean Dean | October 06, 2007 at 02:35 AM
You know what my problem is not so much with Spam as with the fact the Outlook (at least the 2007 version I use at work) tends to suck resources and simply lock my machine up while its doing its thing.
I actual use the web version Outlook because the app is so frustrating. Sorry. I'm just glad that I can use Gmail for all non-work emailing and calendaring.
Posted by: Tim Bednar | October 09, 2007 at 10:57 PM
Good point Tim.
I would guess most church staff don't use a gmail account for work. They have an email@churchname.com address.
While hacks to forward their mail to gmail can work (seamlessly), the corporate crowd will not leave MS Office anytime soon. And I'm sure the church crowd will remain with Outlook as well.
Given that, I still strongly promote the usefulness of an open-source plugin that can be installed at both the client and server level. The church IT person can install SpamBayes on his server, and then everyone at the church won't even have to worry about spam filtering on their individual Outlook clients...
Practicality trumps idealism. As much as I dislike Microsoft and love Google, Outlook will dominate corporate and small business offices for a very long time. If I was an individual consultant however, I'd go with gmail all the way...
Posted by: joe | October 10, 2007 at 11:04 AM
With Google Apps for domains: http://google.com/a/ you can have the best of both worlds! You get gmail powered @domain addresses and can still forward/pop into outlook (if you want to).
I'm just getting my Church into gApps and so far so good! The pastor also loves the idea of google docs for order of services and groups notes, etc.!
Posted by: James | October 12, 2007 at 08:03 AM