Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Outlook Filter/Rule to Remove Spam from YOURSELF?

My MS Outlook Exchange account is littered with SPAM - so I turned on the junk email filter on. This enables the auto rules that move "junk"-ish email into the junk mail folder. It does not move all junk email to junk mail folder but for the ones that pass through the filter I can individually right click and include them as junk, so the next time the same email address sends me anything, it will be considered as junk.

So, I am golden, right? Yes ... for a while ... until I start to get junk emails from MYSELF. I am pretty sure that my computer is clean from adwares, viruses, etc. So, it must be that the spammers have gotten my email address and they are spamming me using it. If I try to include those email in the blocked senders list, I can't - since the sender's address is my own email address.

To handle this, initially I create a filter to block certain subjects (since they are all have similar subjects). This works for a while. But as time goes, I have to keep adding and adding more subjects into my rules - which becomes very large. There must be an easier way!

Here is how I solved the problem above:

I created a new rule in Outlook, and the rule is basically checking my email header. So I check for email sent by my email address but is not sent from my Exchange server and move those to junk mail folder (and stop processing any more rules). Voila! Now my Inbox is clean and I can remove my bloated "subject" rule.

2 comments:

Dena Speranza said...

Thanks Joe! I'm going to give this a try...anything to help reduce the spam!

Johannes Setiabudi said...

Let me know if you need help - I will be at the Dublin office on Monday