Fed up with Outlook

[Harlesden]

Every day, up to a dozen e-mails clutter up my Junk folder which are clearly fake, purporting to come from respected entities such as Google, WhatsApp, Microsoft etc, but bearing very obscure addresses.
Surely there is an e-mail provider that will routinely block these fake mails. I ask because Outlook is now telling me I have blocked the maximum permitted number of senders

 

[rdeez]

Are you using the Outlook web app or the desktop app?

On the web version at least, you can do this:

This would delete all junk emails automatically after 3 days. Not perfect, but it's something.

On the desktop version:

 

[ainsworth74]

If they go straight into your junk folder what's the issue? I get loads of them but Gmail sends 99.9% straight into my junk folder so I don't even think about them.

 

[CatfordCat]

I found that automated spam filters blocked some things that weren't spam (including on one occasion an invitation to a job interview) and let too many things that were spam through. The automated filter also objected to an e-mail someone sent me that referred to a particular make of buses (named after the city they were built in) in the plural...

You're lucky it's only a dozen - I handle e-mails for a voluntary organisation, and of course our e-mail address is in the public domain. Last time I counted, we average about 25 e-mails a day, about 4 or 5 of which we actually want.

I'm not convinced that blocking senders is effective - many spammers use disposable e-mail addresses, others send e-mails that are faked to look like they are from legitimate addresses (either organisations, or from someone's address book that they have hacked - hence getting what at first glance seems to be an e-mail from someone you know that turns out to be spam - got one earlier this week that purported to be from an acquaintance who died a year or two back)

I use a program called 'pop tray' (it's available as a free download) - means you can preview e-mails in plain text and zap them straight off the server if you don't like them.

 

[brianthebrain]

Maybe you can speak to someone at outlook and request more "space" on the blocked senders' list? It's just a guess but it must be possible. If not, may be worth looking at different providers. I have my main email address with 1&1 and never seem to have any problems with spam/trusted sender confusion!

 

[Geezertronic]

It shouldn't really be Outlooks job (or yours) to block & categorise spam these days, there should be options at your service providers side to do all of this and whilst not 100% accurate, it should get rid of most of the junk email.

Some service providers have the options on as standard, others you may have to enable them

 

[SteveP29]

I used to be plagued by spam, was receiving hundreds of emails a day.

I found this program and installed it.

It works by logging into the server you use and it extracts the emails from there. You then select which emails you want to receive, the rest are deleted directly from the server, so it looks to the sender like your email address doesn't exist. It also builds up a non exhaustive list of email addresses that you specify as spam and it will simply delete the email from the server before the emails are seen in the program.

You link the program to whichever email program you use and once you've 'washed' the spam mails out, it automatically launches your email program and the emails will be delivered.

Within days you should see the number of spam emails reducing. It's not 100% effective, but it does give you your inbox back, without having to delete hundreds of emails every time you log on to your email program.

http://www.mailwasher.net/

 

[ComUtoR]

I don't get any spam emails.

I use Outlook as my email client and I have a google email. On the rare occasions where I log in to gmail directly the junk/spam folder is full to the brim of all kinds of rubbish.

The problem isn't with Outlook. If a spam email reaches your email client then it has already gone through various spam filters.

I would suggest resetting your entire blocked senders list. Spam emails don't last and are hard to track because of the way in which they generate the emails.

Then go to your email provider and delete the junk folder and spam folder. Unspam anything that has been wrongly filtered.

When you want to block spam locally using your email client just block the domain if you notice emails are coming from the same domain. That way you can block every email from that domain rather than each and every unique email address.

eg. update @facebookmail.com and notification @facebookmail.com can both be blocked by blocking *.@facebookmail.com

If all else fails. Change your email.

 

[EssexGonzo]

Another vote for Gmail. It's brilliant at filtering out the rubbish.

I don't use a client, just browser/phone/ipad access. I must have tens of thousands of emails languishing on Google's server and wouldn't want to download them all to my laptop.

 

[dgl]

I use outlook/hotmail and own domain email with windows live mail, get very little spam going past the filter. And one click on the x on the spam folder and it's all gone.

 

[Puffing Devil]

Agree that Gmail is the way to go. You can use it to collect email from other sources and it all goes through the spam filters which are very good. I give the spam a scroll through every week and pick out the odd, but not essential, mail that gets flagged in error.

 

[Crossover]

My colleague uses Mailwasher on his personal account.

Personally I use Hotmail and get very little junk (don't think I have ever seen more than 14 in there at a time and they get removed periodically - some of the "junk" is from LinkedIn too)

No spam filter is infalliable (as I try and explain to my colleagues) - we get plenty of spam that gets blocked, but a number will always get through. The fact that they come from random addresses, usually different each time, makes it very difficult to block them. Filtering needs to really be done on an heuristics level that analyses the mail item as a whole