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Junk Mail Filtering

Outlook is willing to help you weed out the junk mail that makes it past the various levels of spam filtering applied to all messages sent to @cornell.edu addresses. It's up to you to decide whether you want this feature turned on and, if so, how aggressively you want it to act.

As delivered, Outlook will put what it considers obvious spam in the Junk E-mail folder, and will, initially, alert you whenever it puts a message there. You can modify this behavior to suit your personal needs and preferences.

Messages that come to you through e-lists (like CIT-alert-L@cornell.edu) are especially susceptible to being misfiled, so read on to learn how to make Outlook smarter.

You can set the basic junk mail filtering to any of four levels:

  • No automatic filtering
  • Low: Only the most obvious spam is filtered out. With this setting you will probably still see some junk mail in your Inbox, but very few legitimate messages will mistakenly be put in the Junk folder. (This is the default value.)
  • High: With this setting nearly all junk mail will be filtered out, but some legitimate messages may also be moved.
  • Safe Lists Only: Only messages from locations you've specified as safe will be delivered to your Inbox. Everything else is considered junk.

If you choose any setting other than "No automatic filtering" we highly recommend that you check your Junk mail folder often, especially in the first few weeks and months of using Outlook 2007.

While reviewing your Junk folder, if you find a message that shouldn't have been marked as junk, right-click on it, and tell Outlook how to handle it. You can specify that a single message is not junk, and it will be moved back to the Inbox. You can also tell Outlook that any future messages from that address should not be labeled as junk. Another option (from the right-click menu) is to stop filtering all messages from the sender's domain, for example, any messages from any address at "cornell.edu."

Along the same lines, if you find a junk message that slipped through and wound up in your Inbox or any other folder, you can right-click on it and tell Outlook to treat all future messages from that address as junk.

Setting Your Junk Mail Options

  1. From the Tools menu select Options.
  2. On the Preferences tab click Junk E-mail (near the top).
  3. On the Options tab, choose the level of protection you want, as described above. you'll also see several checkboxes on the Options tab.
    We recommend that you leave the second (disable links in phishing messages) and the fourth (postmark outgoing mail) checked.
    We strongly recommend that you do NOT select the first checkbox, which will delete junk mail without moving it to the Junk mail folder. If this setting is turned on, you don't have a chance to find messages that were incorrectly filtered.
  4. Use the Safe Senders tab to teach Outlook about the senders you trust. You might want to add "cornell.edu" as a safe sender, along with the full address of any e-list you receive (for example, friends-of-bill-list@yahoo.com).
  5. Use the Blocked Senders tab to teach Outlook about the senders you loathe. You can specify full addresses or domains, or some of each.