Setting up the JUNK mail folder in Microsoft Outlook 2007

Setting up of JUNK folder in your Outlook is really very simple. One may ask why do we need this setting in the first place? Well, with numerous amount of cyber crime on the rise like ‘Phishing’ (refer http://abhradip.blogspot.com/2010/12/phishing-explained-protection.html for details) we need to secure our mailbox so that we keep ourselves safe from these iminnent threats.

To begin with, considering that one already has their mail box configured in Microsoft Outlook (NOTE: Outlook is installed as a part of the Microsoft Office package in your computer so mails accessed here are basically getting downloaded into your local hard disk) be it your service providers email address or any 3rd party email address(yahoo mail, Gmail etc). Now to setup the JUNK mail folder go to “Actions”, then click on “Junk E-mail” followed by “Junk E-mail Options” as shown in the figure below.



Once done the following window should open up as shown:



By default under “Options” Tab, the Junk detection should “Low” as shown, my recommendation if you are a novice user change it to “High” and keep the rest of the settings as shown in the screenshot above. For advanced users my suggestion you can experiment with the “Safe list Only” option as one can add not only the mail addresses of your contacts to declare them as safe mails, you can also add mail addresses of “subscribed E-mails” for them to be treated as safe.

Next comes the “Safe sender” Tab, here you can manually add the E-mail addresses that you send your mails to so once a reply is received from the same E-mail address Outlook does not treat it as a threat, or else let Outlook do the hard work for you if you put a tick in the check box “Automatically add people I e-mail to the Safe Senders list”, click on “Apply” for the changes to take effect,find the screen shot attached for reference.



After you do the needful settings in the “Safe Senders” Tab as explained above, move to the “Safe Recipients” Tab where you can configure other email addresses that you like to receive and not treat them as threat. Say, you have an E-mail newsletter subscription at http://www.ebay.com and the items comes from an E-mail ID say XXXXX.XXXX@ebay.com, you can add this mailID to your “Safe Recipients” list so that any spams send from any other E-mail address bearing the same domain (ie, ebay.com) would be safely guided out of your Inobx by the filter that we are creating. Please find Screen shot for reference



There is also a Tab called as “Blocked Senders” wherein one can block any E-mail address known to be a regular spam sender by adding the same in here and hence forth all mails from the sender would for sure end up in the JUNK.

So better go ahead make the changes asap, an’ make your Inbox clean as ever.