I don’t personally use the Windows Mail client that comes with Windows Vista, but while I was researching how to use it to access my Gmail locally, I discovered a nice option in the Junk Email Options pane. Blocking Spam from International Senders
A large amount of the spam that I get consists of mail coming from all sorts of international domains. Since I don’t have many close friends that live in other countries, I really don’t need to see any email from most of those domains, at least not on my personal accounts. Blocking Spam from International Senders
To block all of that spam mail from hitting your inbox, open Windows Mail and go to the Tools \ Junk Mail Options item. Click the International tab, and you should see this screen:
There are two seperate ways that you can block international spam: First, you can block the domains themselves by selecting them here. If you do the Select All option, you should be warned that .US is also in that list.
You can also choose to block message encodings. I blocked all of the asian message encodings, because I definitely can’t read those languages, and about 1/10th of the spam I get these days is encoded in one of those types. Again, be careful about doing the Select All option or you will end up blocking all email from everybody.
Thwarting Spam with Windows Mail’s Junk FilterSpamunsolicited commercial messageshas become a plague upon the earth. Unless you’ve done a masterful job at keeping your address secret, you probably receive at least a few spam emails every day, and it’s more likely that you receive a few dozen. The bad news is that most experts agree that it’s only going to get worse. And why not? Spam is one of the few advertising media for which the costs are substantially borne by the users, not the advertisers. The best way to avoid spam is to not get on a spammer’s list of addresses in the first place. That’s hard to do these days, but there are some steps you can take:
If you do get spam despite these precautions, the good news is that Windows Mail comes with a Junk Email feature that can help you cope. Junk Email is a spam filter, which means that it examines each incoming message and applies sophisticated tests to determine whether the message is spam. If the tests determine that the message is probably spam, the email is exiled to a separate Junk E-mail folder. The Windows Mail spam filter is based on the much-admired filter that comes with Outlook 2003, which was voted best spam filter by Consumer Reports in September 2005. It’s not perfect (no spam filter is), but with a bit of fine-tuning as described in the next few sections, it can be a very useful antispam weapon. Setting the Junk Email Protection LevelFiltering spam is always a trade-off between protection and convenience. That is, the stronger the protection you use, the less convenient the filter becomes, and vice versa. This inverse relationship is caused by a filter phenomenon called the false positive. This is a legitimate message that the filter has pegged as spam and so (in Windows Mail’s case) moved the message to the Junk E-mail folder. The stronger the protection level, the more likely it is that false positives will occur, so the more time you must spend checking the Junk E-mail folder for legitimate messages that need to be rescued. Fortunately, Windows Mail gives you several Junk Email levels to choose from so you can choose a level that gives the blend of protection and convenience that suits you. To set the Junk Email level, select Tools, Junk E-mail Options. Windows Mail displays the Junk E-mail Options dialog box. The Options tab, shown in Figure 6.25, gives you four options for the Junk Email protection level:
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