The exchange rules are good, but like anything they are only as good as their last update. Lately I’ve been getting a lot of “greetingcard” type emails in my inbox. I find Outlook’s junk mail filter wants to just block the sender (which seems to be different on every piece of spam), so I generally create a rule along the lines of “if email contains text xxxxxx, move to junk mail”.

Lately though I’ve run into a limit in the amount of rules Outlook/Exchange allows. I’ve been retiring old ones to make way for the new ones, so far that seems to be ok.

What I’d like to do, and haven’t looked into it yet to see if it is possible, is share my rules with the other folks in the company: so if I create a rule that says “if email contains text xxxxxx, move to junk mail”, everyone else here also gets that rule.

You are certainly getting more spam than I. I would say my average seems to be about 5% of my email is valid emails either from known people or from newsletters and other sources like Tiger Direct from which I don’t mind receiving info from.

One solution that I have heard of is one where anyone who is sending an email to you must be validated first. It sounds like a good solution but I have not been brave enough to try it yet myself.

One thing I have been very strict with is telling the Microsoft Junk Email tool what emails are junk mail. It takes me about 2 minutes each day but it certainly does seem to have helped to keep that ‘crap’ out of my inbox.

I heard that the City of Toronto system administrators have estimated that about 98% of the email that goes through their network and servers is some kind of spam.

Would it not be nice if we could just send it back to the originator on a regular basis. I wonder how long they would last?

Terry Lewis
http://www.tmhrconsulting.com