| How Outlook
2003 takes care of spam on its own |
David Coursey
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Monday, Oct. 20, 2003 |
|
I can think of only one really good
reason why the average Microsoft Office user should upgrade to the 2003 version,
which goes on sale this week. Fortunately, it's the application most of us spend
the most time with each day: Outlook.
THE BEST NEW FEATURE in Outlook is something you won't see, but
which you'll know is there because of something else you won't see. I'm talking
about the new Outlook junk-mail filter, which in my informal testing has done an
exceptional job of ridding my inbox of spam.
I've been using Outlook 2003 as my default e-mail client,
on multiple machines, for more than a month. I like it enough that I've
uninstalled the rest of my antispam arsenal. That includes third-party
applications as well as services, which I found effective but difficult for both
sender and recipient to use, not to mention expensive.
When set in "high" blocking mode, the Outlook filter has
been something like 95 percent effective in sending spam to my junk-mail folder
instead of my inbox. More importantly, the filter is 100 percent effective in
blocking pornographic spam containing pictures. Your results may vary, depending
on how much mail you get and how much of it is junk. But that's as good a block
rate as any spam filter I've seen that doesn't require all senders to register
themselves onto a "white list" of authenticated e-mail addresses.
Also, the Microsoft Outlook filter comes with the program
and doesn't cost extra. Perhaps the one thing that angers me most about spam is
the prospect of paying $50 or more each year for a filtering service.
Because the spam filtering is built into Outlook, I don't
have to install a separate application. In the past, this hasn't been so much a
compatibility problem as a bother. But anytime I don't have to install something
extra, I consider it a win for system stability.
MICROSOFT'S SPAM FILTER doesn't work like most of
the standalone products I've seen. While you can add senders to the safe list
(which by default already includes your Outlook contact list) and also block
addresses that send you spam, the system doesn't attempt to learn from what mail
you mark as "spam" and "not spam."
Without getting into the specifics, Microsoft has already
looked at millions of spam and non-spam e-mails and created a filtering
mechanism based on some 100,000 variables. This filter is installed as part of
Outlook and used to score each incoming message for its spam potential. Cross a
certain threshold and the message goes to the spam folder.
Outlook provides two threshold settings: low and high. The
default setting is low, which is a good place to run the filter for the first
week or two. During this time you will see more spam, but the chances of a false
positive trashing a non-spam message are reduced.
While in "low" mode, you can check the spam folder
occasionally and add senders who triggered a false positive to your safe senders
list. This is especially important for any mailing lists you're on. I was,
however, pleasantly surprised that many commercial messages that I actually
wanted to receive didn't trigger the spam filter at all.
After a week or two in "low" mode, switch to "high" and
you should start seeing the 95 percent or better effectiveness that I've
enjoyed. For example, this past Thursday, Outlook sent 264 messages to my junk
mail folder. Of those, none were false positives and Outlook allowed only six
messages through to my inbox that I considered to be blockable spam. There were
also a couple of messages without any content that were apparently being used to
verify my e-mail address that also got through.
I've been researching Microsoft's antispam technology and
will report back next Monday more specifically on how it works and how the
company plans to stay ahead of spammers' efforts to defeat it.
TWO OTHER ASPECTS of Microsoft's war on spam should
be of particular interest to AnchorDesk readers: One is a feature that allows
you to add an entire domain to the safe senders list. This matters for
newsletters (like ours) that don't appear to come from a single address, but
rather from different addresses within a single domain. The new Outlook can
accept mail from that domain, so your newsletters get through.
Microsoft has also added a default feature for preventing
HTML e-mail from being displayed. Besides preventing porn from showing up in
your e-mail, it also keeps people from using server-side HTML images to "spy" on
whether you opened the e-mail or not.
This feature, however, also removes graphical elements
from newsletters like AnchorDesk, as well as from my daily New York
Times, BBC News, and other image-laden e-mails I want to receive.
Adding these senders to the safe senders list, which can be done from within the
e-mail or preview pane, allows the images to come through.
Besides the new spam filter, which replaces the
ineffective filtering Microsoft had been using for several years, there are
other reasons to consider an Outlook upgrade as well:
- The 2003 version manages to display more content than earlier versions in
the same amount of screen real estate. This is a time-saver and thus a
productivity improvement. Yes, the screen is busier-looking and may take a
little getting used to, but the usability improvements become evident in a
short time.
The reading pane has been improved, allowing many messages to be read and
responded to without actually opening them in a separate window.
It is now much easier to flag messages you want to work with later. For
high-volume mail users this keeps messages from getting lost.
A search folder has been added, allowing you to easily see things like all
your flagged messages. You can create custom search folders, which
automatically perform the search in the background, allowing you to quickly
view collections of messages selected by your chosen criteria. Taken
together, these new features dramatically improve Outlook's usability for people
who receive and send a lot of e-mail. If you're one of these people and the spam
filter hasn't already sold you on the upgrade, these features should.
Next Monday, I will talk more about Microsoft's war on
spam and the role Office plays in it, including more details on how the spam
filter actually works. In later columns, I hope to address the other programs in
the Office system and what new features have been added to their 2003 versions.
And we'll wrap up with a report on my experiences with Microsoft's 2003 version
of its Small Business Server, which I really like.
Charles Mims
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