Jacob said:
I want to move a copy of incoming mail to a folder, but I want to exclude
Junk mail.
Since there is no way to define a rule that handles the junk filtering
(i.e., disable the junk filter option and use a rule for junk filtering),
you cannot dictate where in your set of rules as to when junk filtering gets
applied. Outlook applies its junk filter before exercising the rules. Spam
filtering is a guessing game. Your rules test on known qualities of an
e-mail. Spam filtering should apply to unknown e-mails so it should be
performed last but Microsoft didn't do it that way in their e-mail clients.
This is why I turned off junk filtering and instead use a 3rd party
anti-spam product to tag the suspect e-mails. I create a rule that looks
for the spam tag and I decide where where in my set of rules to place that
spam handling rule. For blacklist rules (that delete e-mails), I don't care
if the e-mail was spam or not. For whitelist rules (that keep the e-mails
in the inbox or move to a special folder), they should never be handled as
spam. For junk rules (e-mails that has some bad quality where I delete them
or move into the junk folder where auto-archive permanently deletes them
after 3 days), I don't care whether they were spam or not. Those are known
e-mails. The guessing performed by spam filters should be performed on the
rest of the e-mails (on the unknown e-mails).
I have rules that want to keep some known e-mails (i.e., they have a quality
that tags them, to me, as good e-mails) yet Outlook's junk filter will tag
them as junk. Those are false positives and a problem with every spam
filtering scheme. That's why the guessing on unknown e-mails should be
performed after the testing of your rules against known e-mails (i.e.,
having some quality that you decide on the handling action regardless of
whether a spam filter thinks an e-mail is spam or ham).
You could turn off Outlook's junk filter and rely on external client- or
server-side spam filters. You could set it to Low and hope that Outlook's
junk filter doesn't generate too many false positives on your known e-mails
(those that match on a rule).
