Turning Off Spam-Catching Rules

I’m bit­ing my nails as I write this. I’ve just dis­abled all the Outlook rules I cre­at­ed to catch and get rid of spam.

Until now I’ve used 14 sep­a­rate mail­box rules, con­tain­ing hun­dreds of con­di­tions, to catch incom­ing spam e‑mail, flag it as such, and either delete it out­right, stick it in a “Might be Spam” fold­er, or bounce it back to its orig­i­nat­ing address. When you get an aver­age of 10,000 spam mes­sages per day across all your e‑mail address­es like I do, you need some­thing to han­dle them, to sep­a­rte them from the legit­i­mate mail. Outlook did that for me, albeit with my con­stant vig­i­lance ana­lyz­ing uncaught spam and updat­ing the mail­box rules to catch them in the future.

Lately, though, I’ve begun to won­der if I need those rules. My “Spam,” “Might be Spam,” and “Deleted Items” fold­ers con­tain vir­tu­al­ly no spam. Rather, Outlook seems to have more false pos­i­tives on legit­i­mate mail. I still get as much spam sent to me, but it nev­er gets through to my Outlook inbox. Spam Arrest, which I’ve been using for 9 months now, catch­es near­ly all of it. At left you can see the break­down of my mail, how much Spam Arrest catch­es and fil­ters out.

So, I’m tak­ing a chance today. I’ve turned off all the Outlook spam fil­ter­ing rules to see what hap­pens. If I don’t get any spam today, I’ll leave the rules off and see how tomor­row goes, and the next day, and so on.