January 6, 2006 2

Filtering out what you don’t understand

By in Blog Post

I couldn’t figure out why my Junk Email filter on Outlook appeared to kick the bucket when I reset my laptop a couple of months ago – then this morning, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted something go in the junk mail folder and then get pulled out. It appears that all this time my message rules have been working against me and pulling junk mail back out of the junk folder and into my other folders. Hmph.

So, after a little Googling I found a MS Knowledge Base article that indicates Office Service Pack 1 solves this issue. (Why QA when you can patch?). It turns out SP 2 is actually out not for it as well so I installed it as well. Junk Email problem fixed and as an added bonus I got a tab added to my junk email options pop-up:

I’d love to know who suggested this feature – because we all know the best way to deal with things we’re unfamiliar with is to discard them and pretend they don’t exist. Thankfully this feature isn’t enabled by default. Personally, I don’t get any SPAM in a language other than English (although English is a loose description for what some of them are written in) – so generally if I get an email in something other than English it’s likely that the sender actually bothered to email me. At the very least I’ll run it through some freebie Machine Translator to see what pops out, or maybe run it by someone who might understand it.

I shudder to think how many inboxes are checked to only receive English emails. The tab should really be labeled “Uninternational”.

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  • Patrick Hall

    Wow, that looks pretty horrifying…

    I sent Michael Kaplan at Microsoft a pointer to your post.

    http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/

    Hope your holidays were happy!

  • Ryan

    Thanks Patrick, I see he made a post about it. Some good discussion starting over there regarding it too.

    I think what I found strangest about that menu was the first couple of lines. I’m sure there’s some marginally justifiable reason for the feature but the wording of that first paragraph is just wrong.

    I didn’t even catch the “Select All” bit – I’m sure someone has already managed to block out all their email by assuming English/American domains etc. wouldn’t be on the list.

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