Spam Alerts

[Dave]

New to Outlook. Many of my routine, known and safe
incoming emails now show "Spam Alert" in subject line --
a label apparently inserted by Outlook. How to I
configure Outlook not to so label acceptable emails?

 

[Vanguard]

Sounds more like you installed Norton Spam Alert which inserts a "Spam
Alert:" tag in the Subject header. Norton Spam Alert also comes
packaged in Norton Internet Security 2003+. However, even after
installing Spam Alert, I believe you are required to define a rule in
Outlook to decide what to do with this marked e-mail. That is, Spam
Alert marks it but does nothing else with it, so you have to define a
rule to move it into a holding folder (Junk, Spam, whatever) or to
[permanently] delete it (providing you don't care about deleting false
positives, e-mails that get marked as spam but which are not spam).
SpamPal works the same way, running as a proxy through which your e-mail
passes to check it for spam. Spam gets marked by the addition of a
"X-SpamPal: SPAM" header and optionally you can have it add a tag to the
Subject header ("**SPAM***" is the default tag string). But nothing
happens to the suspect e-mail unless you define a rule in your e-mail
client to check for that header and/or tag string in the Subject.

 

[Dave]

Thanks. It's likely Norton, which I do have installed.
You are right, Outlook deos nothing with the labeled
emails and I would have to configure it appropriately to
do so. The emails in question have not been spam but
obvioulsy look that way to Norton. Suspect that I could
configure Norton appropriately as well. Thanks again.

-----Original Message-----
Sounds more like you installed Norton Spam Alert which inserts a "Spam
Alert:" tag in the Subject header. Norton Spam Alert also comes
packaged in Norton Internet Security 2003+. However, even after
installing Spam Alert, I believe you are required to define a rule in
Outlook to decide what to do with this marked e-mail. That is, Spam
Alert marks it but does nothing else with it, so you have to define a
rule to move it into a holding folder (Junk, Spam, whatever) or to
[permanently] delete it (providing you don't care about deleting false
positives, e-mails that get marked as spam but which are not spam).
SpamPal works the same way, running as a proxy through which your e-mail
passes to check it for spam. Spam gets marked by the addition of a
"X-SpamPal: SPAM" header and optionally you can have it add a tag to the
Subject header ("**SPAM***" is the default tag string). But nothing
happens to the suspect e-mail unless you define a rule in your e-mail
client to check for that header and/or tag string in the Subject.___
** Share with others. Post replies in the newsgroup.
** If present, remove all "-NIX" from my email address.
_________________________________________________________ ___

New to Outlook. Many of my routine, known and safe
incoming emails now show "Spam Alert" in subject line - -
a label apparently inserted by Outlook. How to I
configure Outlook not to so label acceptable emails?

.

 

[Vanguard]

Well, there's not much you can configure in Norton Spam Alert (NSA)
other than to add a bad words list and that's pretty much worthless.
Bayesian filtering statistically weights words based on past spams
received but NSA doesn't provide that type of word filtering. I would
suggest you define a rule to trigger on "Spam Alert:" in the Subject
header and move that e-mail to your Junk or spam folder. Turn off the
Preview pane in that folder and instead use AutoPreview to show the
first few lines of each suspect e-mail but only as text. Also set
auto-archive in that folder to kill any items saved in there after, say,
3 to 5 days (and make sure to enable the global AutoArchive option to
run at an equal or shorter interval). That let's you retrieve (move
out) any false positives that got moved into this junk folder before
they get deleted.

Although I use NSA to catch some spam, I find SpamPal (free) will catch
more of them. It determines what is spam by *where* it originated
(i.e., it came from a known spam source). It has a Bayesian plug-in
(also free) to statistically weight the words within the e-mail to
determine a threshold on how bad is an e-mail to qualify it as spam.
The HTML-Modify plug-in will strip out any nasties from HTML-formatted
e-mails (although settings in the Restricted Sites security zone, which
you should be using, already cover some of that functionality). None of
the IE security zones will strip out linked images which are used for
web bugs or beacons to let the sender know that you opened their e-mail.
However, all HTML-formatted e-mails get altered by HTML-Modify so I
configure it to only strip the crap from e-mails marked as spam (which
can be marked as such by SpamPal, Bayesian plug-in, or the criteria
configured in HTML-Modify). I had to disable the option to mark e-mail
as spam by HTML-Modify which did not have a plain-text section and only
had an HTML section. A lot of HTML-formatted e-mails are like this but
e-mails sent from many webmail providers, like Hotmail, only have an
HTML section and no alternative text-only section.

If your ISP has a webmail interface to your e-mail account, check its
options to see if you can enable an anti-spam feature there. That gets
rid of some spam at the server so you don't waste time downloading it
(and then delete it at your end if it got detected). So I have my ISP's
anti-spam filtering, Norton's Spam Alert, and SpamPal with its Bayesian
& HTML-Modify plug-ins. I think there has been one spam that got left
in my Inbox in the last 3 months. Occasionally I review the From and
Subject headers in the auto-archived Junk folder just to see if
someone's good e-mail got moved by accident (i.e., false positive)
although when there has been a false positive it has usually been
because of my own rules defined in Outlook.