Your Safe or Trusted senders lists should be much longer than the list of blocked addresses and domains. The blocked list should only contain the addresses of legitimate but annoying senders. For example, my blocked lists contain the address of a person who forwards me a lot of things he thinks are cute and the domains of a couple of businesses that send newsletters. These are newsletters I'm either too lazy to remove my address from, don't know what address I used when I signed up and can't get removed until I remember, or their remove procedure doesn't work. My safe list is very long -- any address or domain that sends mail that is wrongly moved to the junk email folder is on the safe lists.

Another reason for keeping the lists small is that Outlook 2003 limits the size of all safe and blocked lists to about 2000 addresses. Other versions allow larger blocked lists, but resources are affected by bigger lists, so smaller is better here too.

Another user had this problem:

"Microsoft Outlook is deleting all kinds of emails after setting up a rule, these are emails that DIDN'T include what I put into the rule. I set up the rule to permanently delete them too... those emails were very important"

What I really wanted to say is this: "Why is it so important that the messages get deleted permanently? What's wrong with moving them to the Deleted Items folder and either using AutoArchive to keep it cleaned out or set Outlook to empty Deleted Items on exit?"

Using AutoArchive configured to delete mail more than a couple of days old gives you plenty of time to look for misdirected messages, too.

Ignoring the fact that spammers use many creative ways to spell the words you are most likely to filter out, making most subject or body rules useless, a subject or body "contains" type of rule doesn't work well with HTML email and especially with HTML formatted spam. Spammers split the words in the HTML code using comments, so what you see rendered in the message not what the filter is looking for.

It turns out this user's rule was configured with letter combinations that are found in many commonly used words. To filter for whole words, you need to use a space before and after the word, otherwise Outlook looks for the letters in every word. Not testing the rule by assigning categories or moving the messages to another folder was a big mistake.

Since blocking senders and using rules to filter words are not good methods to manage spam, what is the best way to remove it?

For starters, most spam (and all viruses) should be removed from the mail stream before the message ever reaches users' in-boxes, especially in a corporate environment. Employees are paid to work, not tweak rules to remove spam. When this is not possible, such as on ISP provided email accounts, a client-side anti-spam filter is better than rules.

If you use Outlook 2003, get the latest update for the spam filter and set it on High. Microsoft has been releasing updates monthly. The latest update came out August 22. If you forget to check for updates, use the new Microsoft Update service to keep both Windows and Office automatically updated. Use the safe list to keep false positives low.