The most likely culprit of missing email for Outlook 2003 users is the Junk E-mail Filter. The Junk E-Mail filter, when trained properly, is a wonderful addition to any e-mail environment. This technology can be taught how to determine what messages are junk e-mail, with your assistance, and forward it to a Junk E-mail folder for you.

For more information about Junk E-Mail filters please point your browser to:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011590551033.aspx

The Junk E-mail Filter in Outlook is turned on by default and may catch some legitimate e-mail. Any message that is caught by the Junk E-mail Filter is moved to a special Junk E-mail folder. You should review messages in the Junk E-mail folder from time to time to make sure that they are not legitimate messages that you want to see. Over time you can train the Junk E-mail filter to recognize which items are junk and which items are legitimate. Keep reading for more instructions on how you can do this.

For more information about Junk E-Mail filters please point your browser to:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011590551033.aspx

The Junk E-Mail settings are stored in a file on your workstation or on the Exchange server depending on your settings. With the transition, MIS Technicians have changed the location that Outlook searches for your mail and the settings that control how your mail is handled. Once all of the users have been transitioned to the new server MIS will be able to assist you in the process of importing most of the settings that you have used in the past.

In the meantime you will need to verify that all of the email that is being transferred to the Junk E-Mail folder is actually junk e-mail and act accordingly. I have outlined the different options that you have for setting this filter.

Outlook 2003 has built in three Junk e-mail Filter lists — Safe Senders, Safe Recipients, and Blocked Senders. When you receive email in your inbox it may already be labeled [SPAM] or it may not. Please verify that the email is junk e-mail then right click it and find the “Junk E-mail” option. Place your mouse over “Junk E-mail” and select one of the following options from the list to the right:

Add Sender to Blocked Senders List – Select this option if you want all e-mail from this sender to be automatically forwarded to your Junk E-mail box.

Add Sender to Safe Senders List – Select this option if an item is inadvertently marked as [SPAM] and/or forwarded to your Junk E-mail box.

Add Sender’s Domain [@example.com] to Safe Senders List – Select this option for e-mail addresses that are from domains that you would normally receive e-mail from. (i.e. [@eng.ufl.edu] or [@ufl.edu])

Add Recipient to Safe Recipients List – Select this option if you belong to a mailing list or a distribution list. You can add the list sender to the Safe Recipients List, so that messages sent to these e-mail addresses or domain names are never treated as junk, regardless of the content of the message.

Mark as Not Junk – Select this option if messages are inadvertently labeled as Junk E-mail and you would like them returned to your inbox. You will then have the option to always trust email received from that sender and always trust email sent to the recipient (designed for items sent to a distribution list). By selecting this option you are training your Junk E-Mail filter to recognize what is legitimate and what is not.

For more information about Junk E-Mail filters please point your browser to:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011590551033.aspx

Eudora will do it's best to properly junk messages... but undoubtedly during the first few days it'll be wrong. What do you do? For messages that are not properly junked (spam that is still in your In mailbox), simply right-click and choose Junk from the context menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut of CTRL-J once the message is selected.

You'll also want to periodically check the Junk mailbox to see if there were any false positives (a message that was junked that shouldn't have been). If there is a false positive, right-click on it and select Not Junk. Marking it as Not Junk should move the message back to the In mailbox.

Everytime you mark something as Junk or Not Junk Eudora will get a little bit smarter and, hopefully, not make the same mistake again. This process is referred to as training the filter and could take a few days or weeks until the Junk Mail filter reliably junks messages.

Read more about this and see some sample screenshots illustrating the training process in the Eudora's Junk Mail Feature article.

Eudora has a feature called 'Junk Mail'. You should see a mailbox called Junk right under the In and Out mailboxes. When new mail arrives Eudora's filtering process tries to examine the email and determine if a message should be 'junked' or not. It scores email as junk much the same way as SpamAssassin does. However, the biggest way it learns what is junk mail and what is not is by being trained. Over the course of time, as it is trained, it will become better at recognizing junk email.

In other words, the Junk Mail feature is an automagic way of getting rid of spam email.

Eudora will do it's best to properly junk messages... but undoubtedly during the first few days it'll be wrong. What do you do? For messages that are not properly junked (spam that is still in your In mailbox), simply right-click and choose Junk from the context menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut of CTRL-J once the message is selected.

You'll also want to periodically check the Junk mailbox to see if there were any false positives (a message that was junked that shouldn't have been). If there is a false positive, right-click on it and select Not Junk. Marking it as Not Junk should move the message back to the In mailbox.

There are some additional control settings that can be tuned in the Options control panel within Eudora available through the Tools menu. Such as marking any message coming from someone in your addressbook as not junk. Take a look and see how you can customize this feature for yourself.

Read more about this and see some sample screenshots illustrating the training process in the Eudora's Junk Mail Feature article.

If you notice that messages incorrectly tagged as spam, or messages that are not being tagged as spam but should be, are right on the verge of earning a score that would allow SA to correctly tag them it is better to adjust the score that a test has then to adjust your threshold. As you become familiar with the new system you will see what the tests are and how the are scored. If you notice that a slight adjustment to the score of one of the tests will help you, email the test name and the new score value to MIS.

If you find that a large percentage of legitimate email is being tagged as spam or that spam messages are not being caught by SA this could indicate that the threshold is set incorrectly. The SA threshold can be raised or lowered to any value by MIS. If, after using this new system you notice that only spam messages are scoring in the five range, your threshold can be lowered to five. Conversely, if you have a large amount of legitimate mail being incorrectly tagged as spam, the threshold can be raised. Contact MIS to ask that your threshold be changed.

Yes, SA can be changed so that the new header information is just added to the email or that the SUBJECT line is modified. However, this is much less secure and not recommended.

No, SA is not a virus scanning application.

Spam emails often have a characteristic style or common disclaimers (a large percentage of capital letters, subjects pertaining to refinancing or viagra, being asked to click below, etc). SA uses more than 900 different tests based on these characteristics to determine if a message is spam. Each test that 'hits', meaning the email message has that specific characteristic, has a score associated with it indicating how likely the message is, or is not, spam. If the final score of all tests is above a certain threshold the email will be tagged as spam. The threshold on the COE mail server is currently set to six

Yes, you can contact MIS and request that your email not be filtered.

Yes, MIS has installed SpamAssassin (SA), a programable SPAM filter that checks incoming email and tags messages it thinks are spam. More information about SA can be found in our Filtering Spam article. We have also developed several blacklists, explained below, and other filters for blocking know spammers. In addition to server-side protection we are planning an upgrade to the next version of Eudora which includes a client-side junk mail filter (Eudora will progressively learn to tag spam as you teach it which messages are, and aren't, spam. We also have developed several techniques for preventing email addresses from being harvested from the College of Engineering web server.

All messages should be processed by SA and should have the additional headers added. So, before you assume a spam message was not processed by SA open the message and view the full headers. It may be that the spam did not score high enough in order to be tagged as spam. At times, however, the mail server can become overloaded with incoming and outgoing messages. During these conditions SA will choose to pass the message on without processing it. This is done so that mail messages are not dropped. These conditions should not happen very often.

SA is not full-proof, sometimes legitimate email will be incorrectly tagged as SPAM. It is advised that you periodically review the messages tagged as SPAM to ensure that this has not happened.

Yes. If you find that you are getting SPAM from a certain address, we can force SA to always tag messages from that address as spam (this is called blacklisting). Other tuning of SA can be done by adjusting the scoring threshold or changing the value on specific SA tests. More detail about these options can be found in the Filtering Spam article.

SA is not always accurate. It will tag messages as spam that really aren't. This is called a false positive. The most useful technique in tuning SA to not tag messages as spam is called whitelisting. This refers to creating a list of email addresses that SA will never tag as spam (the opposite of blacklisting). In addition, the threshold or values assigned to SA tests can be changed for you. More detail about these options can be found in the Filtering Spam article.

SA makes several changes to an email once it is tagged as spam. A full discussion of the changes can be found in the Filtering Spam article. Briefly, there are four changes made to a message tagged as spam:

1. Header Additions: several new headers are added to the message to indicate how the message was processed
2. Content Preview: the first few lines of the message are provided as text so you can preview the message
3. Content Analysis: a summary of the tests that hit
4. Attachment: the original message is attached at the end of this new message

These changes are made so that you can use client-side filtering to move all messages tagged as spam to a separate mailbox for later review.

Email that is marked as SPAM that is actually a valid email message.

Creating a list of email addresses whose messages will always be tagged as spam by SA.

Creating a list of email addresses whose messages will never be tagged as spam by SA.

The original message is added as an attachment for security reasons. Many SPAM emails contain obscene content or executable HTML content that can potentially harm your computer. As an attachment you do not have to worry about the harmful side- effects of spam.