Blocking Spam in Outlook in Nebula
Many users are finding that they seem to be getting more "junk" mail in their Inbox when using Exchange, and/or that Exchange sends messages to the "junk" mail unexpectedly. You might think that turning on the "Junk" email handling in Outlook or proper "tuning" of the junk mail feature would be the answer, sadly, it may not be that simple.
- To turn on Outlook's Junk mail handling, you must be running Outlook in "cached" mode. Using cached mode is not recommended for Nebula desktops.
- f you turn on the Outlook Junk email it will likely see any mail sent from your UW colleagues who are NOT using UW Exchange as "junk". It is possible to work around THAT problem by adding all the UW domains from which you want to receive mail (e.g., u.washington.edu, washington.edu, alumni.washington.edu, ischool.washington.edu, etc.) to the "safe senders" list. However, if you do that, then you are exempting such messages from ANY scanning, including for viruses and worms. Sadly, most of the viruses that DO come through do so because they have (forged) addresses in the "washington.edu" space and now you are letting them straight in.
For best results, the "junk" mail filter in the client software (Outlook, Entourage and Outlook Web Access) should be turned off:
- Actions
- Junk e-Mail
- Junk E-Mail Options
- Select first button to turn off filtering
How to use the spam scoring
This is done by a rule, set up in OWA. All "rule" creation should be done only in Outlook Web Access, to guarantee a set that works only on the server and can be managed in one place without conflict. In addition, rules will only work properly when set up in Internet Explorer. They do not work well with the light versions of OWA that run in non-IE browsers.
Access OWA at: https://exchange.washington.edu/owa
Using Outlook Web Access you can easily create a custom rule that emulates the behavior of the "EDM" junk filter rules on the UW Deskmail system.
- If you are using "cache mode on" in Outlook, turn off junk mail handling in Outlook (with "cache mode off" Outlook can't turn on junk mail filtering anyway). Similar steps should be taken for Entourage (junk mail handling off).
- In Outook Web Access, turn off Junk E-mail filtering:
- In Outlook Web Access, construct a custom rule to handle junk mail filtering using a rule designed to emulate junk mail filtering done under the UW Deskmail "EDM" system:
- select Options
- select Rules
- create a new rule with description Apply this rule after the message arrives with "X-Uwash-Spam: Gauge=XXXXXX" in the message header. Move it to the Junk E-Mail folder and stop processing more rules
You can name the rule as you like, such as "Emulate EDM spam rule"
This rule will apply a threshold of "60" for spam rejection, messages scoring 60 or more will be moved to Junk. To change the threshold, add or subtract "X"s from the string. For example, 8 "X"s (XXXXXXXX) would produce a threshold of "80" and messages scoring 80 or more would be moved to Junk. The higher the threshold the less likely you are to move messages to Junk that you might really want, and, conversely, the more likely you are to see "junk" messages in your Inbox.
While you can construct mail handling rules in either Outlook or OWA they do tend to conflict with each other and you'll want to pick one or the other. Using OWA guarantees you're creating "server side" rules that will function even when Outlook is not running and the rules can be modified from multiple locations (usina OWA) not just one desktop.
