The Ongoing Battle Against SPAM
I’m still in love with Outlook, but I have one pet peeve…
The Junk Mail filter is relatively effective. I still have to check my Junk Mail folder daily to make sure it hasn’t flagged something incorrectly, but I can live with that. What annoys me is that when a spam message doesn’t get caught, and I click on "block sender," it then sends the message to the Junk Mail folder. Which means that unless I check my Junk Mail folder BEFORE my Inbox (which almost defeats the purpose of having it), I have to review those same messages twice.
You can set your preferences so that all messages flagged as Junk are automatically deleted, but I don’t want to do that, for the reason stated above. But I think if I manually flag a message as Junk, it should go directly to the Deleted folder, and not to the Junk folder. If there is a way to do this, please let me know, because I haven’t been able to find one!
I do believe I have come up with my answer! Outlook 2007 allows you to assign colour-coded categories to emails (as well as contacts, tasks, and appointments - another great new feature) so I created a new category for Junk Mail, and before I mark it as Junk, I assign it to that category. Then when I’m checking my Junk folder, I know that anything with that category flag has already been confirmed as junk. It’s still an extra step, but it’s a quick and easy one, and it will do until the folks at Microsoft figure this one out.
Comment by Janet Barclay — July 12, 2007 @ 6:31 am