Outlook's Junk Email Filter: The bouncer in your inbox

There's nothing worse finding your home mailbox filled with trash: useless coupons, real estate ads for houses you'll never be able to afford (cruel marketers!), sweepstakes entries, direct mail nonsense, and catalogs for you, your clothes, your hobbies, your wife (her clothes, her hobbies), your kids (ditto), and even your pets.

But wait; there IS something worse: Junk mail in your inbox, clogging it with promises of weight loss, virility, cases of champagne, and miracle cream to erase your fine lines and bad memories.

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 personal concierge (or bouncer as I like to think of it), 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 knock-off handbag they're carrying...

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 want to block email from countries sending you message after message involving royalty, wire transfers, and your changing luck, you'd simply select those countries' two-letter abbreviations and that would be that.
• Blocked Encodings List   This blocks messages that are in a different character set or alphabet.

Read about how to add names to the Junk Email Filter lists.

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.

— Annik