Coffee break- junk email filter is full, what now?
Power came back on after a few hours and I was able to get on with my day. Right now I am sitting in Starbucks (where else) where I had intended to get a lot of writing done but I made the mistake of checking my email first. I got the usual flood of spam to my inbox and while tagging it in Outlook 2007 as junk email so it will not get through to me again I received this error that I have never seen in all the years of using Outlook:
Wow, I have received so much spam over the years that my Exchange Server Junk Email list is now too big. What do I do now? I clicked to manage the list and after several minutes of bringing this massive list in all I can do is delete spammers from the list. I have a feeling I’ll be doing this quite frequently from now on because as soon as I delete one from the list I am vulnerable to receive spam from them again. At which time I’ll have to flag it as spam again and the cycle goes on and on.
I’d setup a second email address on the Exchange Server, then have GMail pickup mail from the first address, get rid of the spam, and forward it to the second email address you created. You could still send mail from the first address, or setup your email clients with a reply-to address and no one should notice the change.
That’s the exact reason why I have been using SpamBayes, it’s free , open source, and works awesome! http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/
Are you running your own Exchange Server (like myself) or using a third party service provider?
I am asking because I am currently running Exchange Server 2003 SP 2. It has the IMF feature which keeps my mailbox very clean – I don’t get any spam in my Inbox, and very few false positive moved to the Junk e-mail folder.
I have no senders added to my filter list. No need to. You do need to keep the IMF filter up-to-date (Automatic Update), which is only enabled through a registry setting (good old Microsoft, releasing the best feature as a hard to find switch).
The IMF is set through the management snapin and it’s easy to configure.
It will simply remove the need of any spam list – also since a lot of spam uses fake e-mail addresses anyway they list could continue to grow forever and your Outlook would be a really slow thing…
Mauricio, I use a hosted exchange server so I can’t do that. How ya been?
Who’s your hosted provider? Most spam (98%+, IMO) is from fake addresses, so your filter list is almost useless. Doesn’t your host offer spam filtering?
James, good thanks…
You could ask your provider if IMF is active or not – and ask them to activate it (and update the registry to get those so needed automatic updates for the filter).
As Ed says, e-mail address filtering is almost useless these days.
I plan on speaking with MailStreet tomorrow about it. I wouldn’t call address filtering useless though, Outlook traps over 200 spam messages a day for me.
But then you have to manually add those addresses…
Hi James, Ever tried MailWasher? It filters, but allows you to view and overide spam filter selections, and deletes spam mail at the server. It never gets as far as outlook.
http://rcd.typepad.com/rcd/2006/07/activewords_mai_1.html
Currently 95.4% of my email is spam, 0% gets near my inbox.
Why dont you have another SMTP server with ANTI-SPAM (Im using the MIMESWEEPER) and so before emails goes to your exchange server it has been filtered out already. And no SPAM on your Exchange database.
Never filter your SPAM on outlook. It is better to eliminate it before going to your exchange server… Not only you can filter SPAM emails you can also set some policies/catefories for your emails.
Chris
James, I use Mailstreet also. For $1.99 you can have Mailstreet Defender added to your account and not have to worry about any kind of manual configuration.
And your address filters have almost nothing to do with Outlook capturing those spams. I have multiple POP accounts here in addition to my Exchange account. None of them have any address filters, and Outlook traps virtually all the spam. You’re seriously wasting your time by adding addresses to your filter list. The only time that’s necessary is if you have some pest using a real e-mail address to send you unwanted mail. I know a few press contacts who fit that profile and I have their stuff filtered out with rules.