Junk email, or spam, has reached epidemic proportions, and with no end in sight, any email program worth its salt must provide robust tools to identify and quarantine spam. The idea is to prevent junk mail from making it to your In box. Spammers get more clever (and maddening) every day, so winnowing the spam from the good email is an increasingly difficult proposition. Solutions that worked fine as little as a year ago may be of little use today. So it is with the Junk Mail Filter in the previous version of Entourage, Entourage X. When it was released, it did a decent job of identifying junk mail, but now it is of hardly any use.
That’s why the Junk Mail Filter in Entourage 2004 is interesting and useful. It uses an entirely different spam detection system than Entourage X. And it’s much better, too: with Entourage X, I needed to use an external utility, the $40 Spamfire Pro, by Matterform Media (see http://www.matterform.com/?page=spamfire/). With the combination of Entourage 2004’s Junk Mail Filter and some of its Mail Rules, I don’t need Spamfire Pro anymore, as Entourage alone does a good enough job of catching my spam and routing it to oblivion. Though Spamfire Pro did a creditable job, it has some draw-backs that I’m happy to be rid of.
The improved junk mail protection is one way in which Microsoft’s research for their Windows products benefits Mac users. The junk mail protection engine in Entourage 2004 is shared by Microsoft Outlook 2003 for Windows. When Microsoft updates the junk mail protection engine for Outlook, they will update it for Entourage as well.
That updating will happen via one of Office 2004’s other new features, Microsoft AutoUpdate, software that queries a Microsoft server for program updates, much as Apple’s Software Update does for Mac OS X and Apple applications. You can tell AutoUpdate to check for software updates automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, or you can choose to check for updates manually.
To take advantage of automatic updating, make sure that AutoUpdate is set. In any Office 2004 program, choose Help > Check for Update, to launch the Microsoft AutoUpdate program. In that window, you need to set how you want to check for updates. Click the Manually or Automatically radio button (the latter is set by default). If you want automatic checking, pick Daily, Weekly, or Monthly from the Frequency pop-up menu.
Next, make sure you are connected to the Internet and click the Check for Updates button. If there are no updates available, the program will tell you after a short wait. If program updates are available for any of the Office 2004 programs, they will download and install; follow the onscreen instructions.
Choose Tools > Junk Email Protection. In the resulting dialog, I suggest you click the High button. This setting keeps most spam out of your In box, but it also increases the chance that valid messages will be wrongly caught and sent to the Junk Email folder (a new folder that appears by default in the Folder List). You must check that folder regularly for mail that was wrongly sent to purgatory, and rescue it (see When It Isn’t Junk, later in this ebook).
Here are the instances in which I recommend the other settings in the dialog:
None: This turns Entourage’s junk mail protection off. If you have an excellent spam-catcher on your email server, or if you are running an external anti-spam utility that snags virtually all spam, then you might not want to use Entourage’s facility.
Money-Saving Tip
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Low: This catches some of the most egregious junk mail, but its performance is nothing to rave about. Try Low if you get too many false positives on the High setting.
Exclusive: This extremely restrictive setting allows only messages from people in your Address Book, addresses in the Mailing List Manager, or addresses from domains in the Safe Domains list (more on that in a moment). Anything else goes to the Junk Email folder. This setting is probably too extreme for most people. If you use it, you need to check the Junk Email folder often for false positives and it’s likely that you’ll miss important email. Imagine missing your e-ticket confirmation from an airline, or missing the order receipt for some goods you bought online. Not good.
Junk Email Protection defaults to deleting email in the Junk Email folder older than 30 days. You can change this setting to a longer or shorter number, depending on the volume of junk mail that you get, or you can turn off automatic deletion and keep your spam forever.
Warning
The automatic deletion of junk mail is useful, but remember that it works in concert with any Mail Rules or Schedules that you have set. A Mail Rule or Schedule takes precedence over the deletion setting in the Junk Email Protection dialog. So if you have automatic deletion set to wipe out junk older than 30 days in Junk Email Protection, and happen to also have a Schedule that empties the Junk Email folder of messages older than 7 days, that junk will stick around for only a week, not a month.
You can tell Entourage that all mail from a particular domain is okay and shouldn’t be treated as junk by adding that domain to the field in the Safe Domains tab of the Junk Email Protection dialog. (In an email address, a domain is the text after the @ sign.) To add a group of domains, type them into the field, separated by commas. This field can also receive entries when you mark a message as Not Junk.
The new Junk Email Protection is pretty good at discriminating between good email and junk mail, but it isn’t perfect. You should check the Junk Email folder periodically (I do it about once a day) to review its contents and, if necessary, rescue messages that have been falsely tarred with the Junk label.
You mark messages as good in almost the same fashion as in Entourage X, with some minor interface changes. As in the previous version, Entourage 2004 puts an informational banner at the top of suspected junk mail with a link that says “This is not junk email.” In addition, a new toolbar button, Not Junk, appears only when you have selected the Junk Email folder in the Folder List. Clicking the link or clicking the Not Junk button brings up a dialog that gives you four choices for rescuing the message:
Add Sender to the Address Book: Messages from contacts in your Address Book are ignored by the junk mail filter, so if you add the email address of the message’s sender to your Address Book, future messages from that address will not be flagged as junk. I use this option for mail from people whom I’m likely to get mail from again, but I don’t bother adding one-time or infrequent correspondents.
Create a Mailing List Rule: Entourage executes mailing list rules before any other rules, and messages caught by the Mailing List Manager are also ignored by the junk mail filter. If you select this option and click OK, Entourage displays a dialog where you can set up a rule. Use this option for mailing lists that you join, so that other rules don’t accidentally filter list messages.
Classify All Messages Sent From the Sender’s Domain As “Not Junk”: This option creates an entry in the Safe Domains tab of the Junk Email Protection dialog.
Just Classify This Message As “Not Junk”: This option removes the Junk flag from this message only.
Messages manually classified as Not Junk are immediately moved from the Junk Email folder to the In box.