Spruce Street said:
Original post on Jan. 20. Vanguard LH had me review and change SPAM
settings
and was on target. Today I rated him before giving follow up. I
guess that
closed the thread.
You cannot "close" discussions in Usenet (newsgroups). I don't know
how Microsoft has attempted to bastardize Usenet with their
webnews-for-dummies interface. Although the thread is closed, does
that mean you cannot continue posting additional replies to it when
using their webnews interface? If so, I suggest you get a real NNTP
(network news transfer protocol) client to access Usenet, like Outlook
Express and connect to Microsoft's NNTP server (msnews.microsoft.com).
I don't care about getting rated. I am in no way striving to become
an MVP. I already got offered a nomination and declined. I don't
know for what purpose is the rating scheme in Microsofts webnews
interface. Maybe it is just some scale to indicate how useful was a
thread; however, since the vast majority of Usenet users don't use
Microsoft's webmail interface, it is a feature that is limited to a
very small audience. Also, since the vast majority of users never
return after resolving a problem, there is little value in this
rating.
I know what was happening but not why or how. I was filtering for
SPAM on
High and had the filter set to send messages directly to be deleted.
When
the message was being downloaded and identified, it would truly
leave my
system and therefore leave the ISP Webmail because I am set to
delete from
server when deleted from Outlook.
Still unknown is why this started now. Same setting for over a
year. More
peculiar, why is it so erratic. Spotty pickup. Caught my
daughter's email
in the netherworld. Perfectly harmless text. Another from her
several hours
later came through without problem.
I am functional but if some one has ideas, I'd like to hear them.
Every month Microsoft pushes yet another "update" to their spam
database (used by their Bayesian-like filter). That means you get
THEIR database of "bad" words with THEIR weighting of them rather than
creating and using your own Bayesian database and weighting based on
YOUR experience with spam. What worked last month (to not get false
positives) could end up not working after the next update because
something Microsoft added to their database now triggers on those old
good e-mails. There are always hazards in using someone else's
Bayesian database, blocklist, hosts file, or bad sites list, or
whatever because they compiled it based on their experience and not
yours.
In prior versions of Outlook, the user could adjust where in the rules
list the Junk rule got exercised. That meant that I could create a
whitelist rule (of everyone in my Contacts folder, for example) and
have those exercised before the Junk rule. The whitelist rule had the
stop-clause so if a sender was in my Contacts folder then their e-mail
stayed in my Inbox and no further anti-spam rules would get exercised
against it. Unfortunately Microsoft decided to let users specify only
one contact-type folder within a rule, so for N contact-type folders
you have to define N whitelist rules that check if the sender is in a
contact-type folder. Fact is, however, that I never enabled the Junk
filter in Outlook because I have better 3rd party anti-spam
alternatives, one of which includes a Bayesian filter that is based on
*my* e-mail experience and not someone else's.
In OL2002 which I still use, I have to create whitelist rules to
filter-in those senders. In OL2003 (and presumably in OL2007), you
can add senders to the Safe List. I don't know if the Safe List is
exercised before the junk filter that got added in OL2003/2007.
However, it seems quite a pain to be duplicating senders in a Safe
List that are already in a contact-type folder. Does OL2003/2007 let
you alter WHEN its junk filter gets exercised, like let you move it
down in the rules list? If so then define a whitelist rule, one for
each contact-type folder, to filter-in the known good senders that you
have chosen to record into those contact-type folders.
I heard that you add a sender to your Contacts folder in OL2003 to get
them whitelisted (but my copy of Vista+OL2007 is taking way too long
to load in VPC to go check). Are the correct e-mail addresses for
your good senders listed in your contact-type folders? Do you have
more than one contact-type folder? If OL2003/2007 does
auto-whitelisting of senders that in a contact-type folder, it is
possible that it only works for senders in the "Contacts" folder and
not in other contact-type folders.
With OL2003/2007's junk filter, presumably you have tried to "Mark as
Not Junk" to see if you can sufficiently unweight those good e-mails
from Microsoft's database. Considering you probably can't tell what
is the weighting for the keywords that Outlook used to tag that e-mail
as spam, you might have to unweight that same e-mail or sender several
times unless you whitelist them (and the whitelisting is exercised
before junk filtering).
