Finally, with the release of the latest version of its corporate communications program, Outlook 2003, Microsoft includes a decent spam filter. Previous versions of Outlook had rudimentary spam filters, but they were, candidly, jokes. But they spawned quite a robust industry in add-on spam filter programs. Some of those may be better than Outlook’s new filter; after all, they’ve had lots of time to perfect their approach. I never found one that would work very well.

Outlook 2003 actually catches and segregates suspected spam e-mails for review. Setting the spam filter to its High position (press Actions/Junk E-mail and then Junk E-mail Options and you’ll get a dialog box like Figure 1. The first tab on the dialog box lets you set the threshold for the spam filter at off, low, high, or safe lists only. The High setting has been very reasonable for me. It catches most, if not all, of the spam bound my way, and hasn’t sent many messages which I wanted to read to the junk mail folder. If Outlook 2003 makes a mistake, you can identify the sender of an ok message as a safe sender, and you’ll get all his or her messages in the future. Conversely, you can block a sender, and won’t get any more messages from that source. If only it were that easy; professional spammers spoof the return addresses so you’ll probably never see the same e-mail address again.

You can also set Outlook 2003’s spam filter to act as a white list filter by clicking on the Safe Lists Only button. That makes Outlook accept e-mails from only a list of people who are on a list of safe senders you create. That’s about the safest form of spam filter known, outside of unplugging your modem! However, it pretty much assures that a lot of messages from sources not on your list will get discarded. That’s unacceptable to me.

In practice, I have found that Outlook now catches maybe 90% of unwanted spam and puts it in a junk e-mail folder for me to review before deleting. That’s on a par with commercial third-party spam filters. Only a couple of times has Outlook put a message I wanted to see in the junk folder, and those were online ads. If you think this is an acceptable level of error, you can tell Outlook to delete suspected spam messages rather than collecting it for review.