Has Microsoft changed their junk mail filter on Entourage recently?

October 31, 2006 12:59 PM

Has Microsoft changed their junk mail filter on Entourage recently?

I have been a user of Entourage on the Mac for years and years. I don't mind the junk filter, but in the past few months it seems like the junk filter is getting greedier. It now filters out ANYTHING with an AOL address on it, even if I've told it not to. And since the update a couple of weeks ago, it's starting to knock other once "legitimate" emails into my junk folder.

I've changed nothing, and this is starting to bother me a lot. Is this possibly an ISP issue?

posted by thewiseacre to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Shot in the dark: who is your ISP? If your ISP uses something like SpamAssassin that assigns a spam "score" to your emails, it's possible that your email client is respecting that score and dumping those mails right into the junk folder.

If you can log into a web control panel for your ISP you might be able to tweak those settings to make things more lenient. For example, if it's Spam Assassin that they're using, you can set the spam score threshhold to 4.0 instead of 3.5--that little bump can make a big difference.
posted by bcwinters at 1:59 PM on October 31, 2006

Has Microsoft changed their junk mail filter on Entourage recently?

The answer is no. The recent (October 10) Office update did not include any changes to Entourage.
posted by kindall at 4:09 PM on October 31, 2006

Response by poster: my ISP is Bellsouth...still, I don't understand why my settings (i.e., it will put email from contacts in my address book into the Junk folder and it will also ignore rules set up to explicitly prevent AOL emails from being put into the Junk folder by the filter) don't override whatever score is set by my ISP.
posted by thewiseacre at 6:29 PM on October 31, 2006

Response by poster: I went to my ISP's website and there's no way to adjust the scoring of spam.

Should I think of using another spam filter instead of the one on Entourage to better control my problem?
posted by thewiseacre at 10:24 AM on November 1, 2006

I use SpamSieve, and highly recommend it, but I am stopping most of my spam server-side these days through blacklisting and other techniques.
posted by kindall at 6:52 PM on November 1, 2006

I'm a new Entourage: mac user. The problem I seem to be having is that even after I have identified an email as "junk mail" Entourage will continue to to put messages from the same sender in my inbox. Also, I've had some problems with Entourage causing my computer to "freeze" up and I've had to do a hard restart. It's been a long time since I used any of the MS Office programs. I recently purchased/installed the suite on my mac and decided to give Entourage a try. Do other people have problems with Entourage causing their computer to freeze up? I'm beginning to think the program isn't worth all the trouble.
posted by crockettc at 6:53 PM on November 1, 2006

The problem I seem to be having is that even after I have identified an email as "junk mail" Entourage will continue to to put messages from the same sender in my inbox

Entourage's spam filter doesn't learn or anything; it's preprogrammed with rules from the factory. Occasionally these are updated as part of an Office update (though as I mentioned, the October update doesn't include any changes to Entourage). Telling Entourage that something is spam or not just moves it to a different folder.

If you want a spam filter that learns, then you definitely want SpamSieve.
posted by kindall at 9:46 PM on November 1, 2006

Response by poster: I have since TURNED OFF the Entourage junk filter YET IT STILL keeps putting emails in the junk filter.

WTF?????
posted by thewiseacre at 3:38 AM on November 21, 2006