Microsoft Outlook Users Guide
Rules WizardRules Wizard can be used to set up “Rules” that conditionally perform an action on message you receive or send.
Conditions can be based on the content of any field, such as subject, date, sender, recipient, etc …
The action may include forwarding, moving, copying, and/or deleting the
message. It may also include auto-replying (with a form message), or notification via a pop-up window.
Rules are useful for sorting, prioritizing, or auto-replying to messages you receive.
To activate Rules Wizard:
Select “Tools->Rules Wizard” from the menu bar
Click the “New…” button to create a new rule, it will step you through…
To deactivate a rule:
Select “Tools->Rules Wizard” from the menu bar
Filtering “Spam”
The number of unsolicited commercial email messages has grown dramatically. In January of 2001 Brightmail recorded 800,000 spam messages per month, but that number has grown to 4.6 million Spam messages per month by May 2002.
Unfortunately there are not yet effective laws regulating the use of email for commercial mass-marketing purposes. It used to be that these types of
communication arrived in envelopes at your house, but that costs the senders a significant amount of money. Now that email has become ubiquitous, marketers have realized that they can reach you via email, at far less expense. It has also lowered the bar – stuff you wouldn’t normally see in an envelope at your house does show up in your email, including offensive materials.
How did they find you? Many web pages you visited in the last few years
recorded the email address that was required by your browser. Many web sites sell lists of email subscribers (it’s one way to squeeze cash out of a .com). Company directories posted on the web are another source.
Once you’re on anybody’s list, game over. Spam galore. Then you try clicking on the links that say “Unsubscribe me from this list” – but the page authors usually interpret this to mean “send me even more junk mail, and while you’re at it, sell my name to others who will do the same”.
It is so easy to set up Spamming services that it has become a problem for all Internet Service Providers, and System Administrators struggle to filter the junk mail before it overwhelms their mail servers. Each advance in filtering is
countered with another advance in spamming techniques. Messages arrive from different source addresses, with different subject lines, etc. There is no way to stop it outright.
Perhaps the most effective (though frustrating) method is to scan the sender, subject, and message preview areas and delete the spam without opening it. Alternatively, you can also set up your own inbox rules that “process” (mark, move or delete) junk mail based on a variety of attributes such as sender names, keywords in the messages, etc.
Editing the default “Junk E-mail” settings
To turn on the junk email feature,
From the Outlook main window, click the “Organize” button on the Toolbar Then choose Junk E-mail
By default, once you turn this feature on, the filter color codes the messages for you. By making the text a light color, your eye will be drawn to other messages. To see who you have already identified as a junk sender, select the “click here” on the last line of text in the Organize window.
Automatically deleting Junk Mail using the default filters
The drop-down list for ‘color’ also contains a ‘move’ option to move the messages to another folder. Once you choose move, the second drop-list contains a list of destination folders (including “deleted items”).
Once you press the “Turn On” button, it changes to “Turn Off”
Although it says there are more options on the last line, there really aren’t. You cannot see the list of keywords or senders that they have decided to put into the Junk category, and as they freely admit, it is not 100% effective. My guess is that “Netscape” and “Navigator” are filtered as junk, but all those Credit Report and Mortgage senders are not.
Setting up your own Junk Mail Filter
Click on “Tools” on the menu bar, then choose “Rules Wizard” , then click the “New” button top start a new filter. You can also edit the existing ones from here.
Once you determine when to filter these messages, you can begin to specify how to determine that they are junk. You have to be careful in setting up these rules to make sure you don’t inadvertently toss important messages too – you can do very broad strokes – but you should try to be as specific as possible.
As you make selections in the list of checkboxes in the top frame, in the lower frame you see the “rule” being constructed.
Organizing your mail in Folders
The Inbox Rules Wizard allows you to automatically move mail into one folder or another based on a variety of criteria.
You can organize your mail by creating folders for certain types of messages, for example I have an “Administrative” folder for administrative messages, a
“Network” folder for networking messages, and a “SUNY” Folder for SUNY correspondence. You can create a new folder and set up an Inbox Rule to direct mail into that folder as it arrives.
To create a new folder. Right click on the Inbox in the “Folder List” frame and choose “New Folder”
Fill in a name for the folder and choose a content type. Once you press “Ok” the new folder will appear in the Folder List frame.
Once you have the folder created, you can create a “rule” to automatically move messages to this folder.
The downside to this is that if you create too many specific-purpose folders, you have to look in more than one location to see new messages that arrive.
Note that the number in parenthesis next to each folder in the Folder List frame indicates how many “new” or unread items there are in that folder. When you create a shortcut on the Outlook bar, it also shows you the number of
