Outlook 2010 can save your hide: Junk Mail Filter as bouncer

Being on the receiving end of and having to wade through all that nonsense is a huge waste of time, taking you away from what's real and what matters most: your clients, your family, your People magazine... Seriously, you can find yourself losing hours of valuable time each week trying to separate the wheat from the chaff (or if you're gluten free, the kernel from the tassel).

Your bouncer, the Junk Mail Filter, evaluates each incoming message (patron) and examines it closely to see if it might be spam (riff-raff) based on several factors including the time it was sent and the content of the message It's like how a bouncer can get a read on someone wanting in simply by the time they show up—too early, maybe—the look of desperation in their eyes, and the sort of handbag they're carrying. (Hey, I didn't say it was FAIR and JUST; what it is, is SMART and SAFE.)

It's important to note that the Junk Email Filter cannot prevent spam from entering your mailbox; what it does is moves it to the Junk Email folder (think of it as a holding pen at a club for suspected schmoes). Then you can go in there and decide what is junk and what isn't.

The greatest thing about this filter is that you can train it as you want. When you boot up Outlook for the first time, the protection level is set to Low but you can go in and change it. But also, you have the opportunity to add things to the list of things that the filter should be looking for. You can add to the:

• Safe Senders List   You can add your Contacts and other correspondents to this list and they'll never treated as junk email, regardless of the content of the message (which, as you can imagine can be both useful and dangerous if you have joke and rumor-forwarding relatives like I have).
• Safe Recipients List   If you belong to a mailing list or a distribution list, you can add the list sender to the Safe Recipients List.
• Blocked Sender List   Messages from people or domain names that appear in this list are always classified as junk, regardless of the content of the message.
• Blocked Top-Level Domains List (my very favorite of all)   You can add country/region codes to the Blocked Top-Level Domains List if you are just sick and tired of getting crazy mails from these countries. For example, if you select NG (Nigeria), this would block messages from email addresses that end in .ng. (I can't imagine why you'd want to do it for this country though...).
• Blocked Encodings List   This blocks messages that are in a different character set or alphabet.

You can read about how to add names to those lists here.

So listen: Sometimes we all need a little help keeping things safe and irritant-free. I'm not telling you to hire a battalion of armed guards or treat every piece of mail with suspicion or anxiety. If you have Outlook, you have a built-in bouncer, and this guy is willing to go the distance and ferret out the junk in your life.

— Crabby