Spam Filter Setup Guide

Microsoft Outlook Express

The Following guide will help you in setting up your “junk” folder in Outlook Express.

Jump to: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, Step 5, Step 6

Step 1

Right click on the Local Folders icon and text that is right above the Inbox. move your mouse down to where it says New Folder... and click on it, a new window will appear entitled Create Folder, type in the word Spam and then click ok. Now go to the tools drop down menu, then to Message Rules and then click Mail...

Step 2

A new window will pop up entitled New Mail Rule, this is where we begin to setup a rule that will help keep your inbox from being cluttered with spam.

There are many options in this window for making rules, for this example we'll be using the "Where the message body contains specific words" option. Start by clicking the check box next to this option, you will see a new line of text appear in the Rule Description field that reads the same thing as the option you just checked, the last half of the statement "contains specific words" will be underlined and blue. Click that text to spawn the window where you will enter the specific words you want to filter for.

Step 3

There are a lot of words that show up frequently in spam - viagra, casino, gambling, hot stocks, loans, rolex, the list goes on and on. Looking through the spam you're already receiving can give you a good clue of what to enter into this window, for this example I used the most common terms I receive spam for.

If the spam you receive happens to contain a lot of links to the same site you may want to consider typing in the last half of the url, for example if a lot of the spam I got contained links to specialoffer1.spamproduct.com I would add the phrase spamproduct.com to my list of words. You can add as many or as few terms as you would like but remember if any email comes into your account with that word or phrase in the body it will be marked as spam.

Step 4

Selecting and defining the actions of your rule is very simple, we'll be using the "Move it to the specified folder" option. Click the check box next to the Move it to the specified folder option and then click the blue underlined word "Specified" in the Rule Description field.

After you've clicked the specified text, a new window will appear

In this window you want to select the Spam folder that we created in the first step and then click Ok.

Step 5

After you've selected the Spam folder to move the offending mail to, click the Ok button in the New Mail Rule window and it will close, but a new window will appear showing you the rule you just made and the description of that rule. From this window you can click the New... button and create more new rules, or you could modify your pre-existing rules by highlighting them and clicking the Modify... button.

Step 6

After you're done setting up your mail rules, highlight the Local Folders icon and text (the same one you did to create the spam folder) and then click the Send and Receive All button. When messages come into your inbox matching the rules you set up they will be transferred to your Spam folder, and not to your inbox. The reason we did not tell the rule to delete the offending message is because a legitimate email could also contain some of those words or phrases. For example if your brother just won big in vegas and sent you an email to tell you about it, that email will more than likely contain the words casino and gambling.