For the past few years I have used the spam filter (called “junk mail”) feature in Outlook 2003 and 2007. Consistently, it has done a terrific job of filtering out virtually all spam sent to the handful of email addresses I use. Recently, though, emails claiming to be from CNN containing my daily news alerts have been passing right through the Outlook filter and into my Inbox.
My first clue that these emails were junk came with my not having any recollection of signing up for CNN news alerts (I use google news for such). So, without even opening the first of these notes I found in my Inbox, I went directly to the Outlook Actions menu, selected “Junk Mail” and then “Add to Blocked Senders.” Since then, Outlook hasn’t caught a single of these phony CNN posts and, for each one, I have gone through the Outlook junk mail procedure in hopes that it might start to catch on. Sadly, I find four or five of these CNN mailings sneaking in every day.
Does anyone out there have a strategy for stopping these? Does anyone know what it is that these spammers did to break the Outlook filter for their messages that 99% of the other spammers haven’t figured out?
I can’t say this is the worst issue I’ve ever encountered but it is quite annoying and I would like for it to go away.
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Have you looked at the Blocked Senders TAB in the Junk E-mail options dialog to be sure the sender’s name is in the list? Try listing just the sender’s domain. If the display name of the sender does not show the domain you can find it in the properties dialog by pressing ALT+Enter on the sender’s name in the From field of the messageheader.
In response to Joe’s comment: yes, I did inspect the domains and email addresses from which these spam messages and what seems to be their successor messages claiming to be from MSNBC were sent from. It looks like this crowd has a ton of highly unrelated sounding email addresses and domains some with widely varying country codes.
Looking through my list of blocked senders ( a pretty large group of email addresses) I seem to only be set up to look at email address and not the text in the “From:” box. I’ll poke around to see if I can figure this out and thank Joe for the pointer.
cdh