Filtering Spam in Outlook 2003

When spam finally starts to get to you:

This page is for Outlook 2003, for Windows. Outlook 2003 is the newest iteration of the Outlook email calendaring package from Microsoft. It is a full featured email client whose only drawbacks are its vulnerability to viruses and its feature bloat. This documentation should also be useful for older versions of Outlook although the position of buttons and the exact names of the fields might be slightly different.

All mail that comes in through the Gatorlink accounts is being given a spam score that indicates its likelihood of being spam. The higher the score the more likely that the message is spam. This score is in the header part, usually hidden, of the email message with the name "X-Spam-Level".

Outlook version as far back as 97/98 have email filtering ability. This ability is usually referred to as "rules" or "filters" or "alerts" in Outlook. All the instructions here are for Outlook version 2003 (v11).

All instructions will come before the screen-shot that shows you a picture of what they are talking about.

Set up Outlook to receive email from the Gatorlink account as per Gatorlink instructions available Here. Use the instructions for the IMAP protocol instead of the POP protocol.
Click the "Tools" pull down menu, then the "Rules and Alerts" option
Click on the "New Rule" button in the top left corner.
Click the "Start from a blank rule" radio button at the top then click the "Next" button at the bottom.
In the top portion of the window scroll down until the option labelled "with specific words in the message header" is visible, then click the check-box that is next to that option. There should now be a new line in the bottom section of this window with the text "with the specific words in the message header."
In the bottom section of the window click on the underlined words "specific words." A new window will open.
In the top line of this window enter the words "X-Spam-Level: *****" exactly as they are written here, capitals are important and the quotes should not be entered. See the screen-shot for clarification. There is one (1) space after the colon. There are five (5) asterisks in the text.
Click the add button. There should be an entry with "X-Spam-Level: *****" appearing in the bottom section of this window surrounded by double quotes. Click the "Ok" button on the bottom. The new window will go away and the previous window will be back on top.
Click the "Next" button at the bottom.
The first option in the top portion of this window should be the "move it to the specified folder" option. Check the box next to that option and then click the underlined word "specified" in the bottom section of this window. A new window will appear with a listing of the folders in your email account.
If you are using the IMAP protocol you should see a folder labeled "imap.ufl.edu." There should be a sub-folder named "Inbox" underneath the "imap.ufl.edu" folder. Single click on the folder named "Inbox" so that it is highlighted and then click the button labelled "New..." on the right hand side. This will open a new window titled "Create a New Folder."
In the "Name:" field type "Junk" and then hit enter. This should close the window that just opened.
There should now be a folder named "Junk" under the "imap.ufl.edu" and the "Inbox" folders. Double click the Junk folder. This should close the window and take you back to the window with the large list of options.
In the top portion of this window scroll to the bottom and select the option labeled "stop processing more rules."
Click the "Finish" button at the bottom right.
The active window should be titled "Rules and Alerts." Click the "Ok" button at the bottom right of this window. That should close the window. The active window should now be the main Outlook window.

Ok, so after all those steps, Outlook should do a lot of mail filtering automatically. But you are not done! What this will do is move mail that is detected as spam to the new folder named "Junk" in your "imap.ufl.edu" account. You are responsible to check this occasionally and to clear out all messages that are indeed spam. These messages will take up space in your 50MB limit so if you ignore it too long then your mail will stop working. This system is not perfect and will label some messages that are not spam (false positives, ham), it will also fail to label some messages that are spam (false negatives, spam). It will cut down significantly on the amount of spam that you have to wade through though and should speed up your mail reading experience.