Blocking and Allowing Specific Addresses

A very useful tool in the fight against spam is Outlook’s ability to define lists of e-mail addresses and domains that are always blocked or always allowed through.

Defining safe senders

A safe sender is a person, or more precisely an e-mail address, whose e-mail messages are always considered to be okay—not spam—regardless of the content. Sometimes a safe senders list is called a white list. You can create a safe senders list based on your contacts and by entering individual addresses. You can also specify entire domains as safe—for example, all messages from Microsoft.com would be considered to be safe. Here are the steps to follow:

1.	Choose Tools Options from the main Outlook window to display the Options dialog box.
2.	On the Preferences tab, click the Junk E-Mail button. Outlook displays the Junk E-Mail dialog box.
3.	If necessary, click the Safe Senders tab (shown in Figure 28-2). Figure 28-2. Defining your Safe Senders list. Blocking/Allowing Individual Senders The context menu is a fast way to add addresses to your safe and blocked lists. All you have to do is right-click the message in the Inbox (or whatever folder it is in), choose Junk E-Mail from the context menu, and then choose the desired action from the next menu. If you have opened a message, you can use the commands in the Junk E-Mail section of the ribbon to perform related commands: Block Sender: Adds the message sender to your Blocked Senders list. Safe Lists: Choose from the menu to add the sender to your Safe Senders or Safe Recipients list or to add the sender’s domain to your Safe Senders list. Not Junk: This command is available only if the message is in your Junk E-Mail folder. Click to move the message to the Inbox and add the sender to your Safe Senders list.
4.	To add an address or domain to the list, click the Add button.
5.	Enter the address (for example, [email protected]) or the domain (for example, microsoft.com or @microsoft.com).
6.	Click OK to add the address or domain to the safe list.
7.	To edit or remove a safe list entry, highlight it in the list and then click the Edit or Remove button.
8.	Click OK.

The other two options in this dialog box are self-explanatory. It is recommended to have the Also Trust E-Mail from My Contacts option selected, because this saves you the effort of entering these addresses manually.

The Import and Export tools are useful if you want to transfer a safe list between Outlook and another e-mail program, or pass your safe list to a friend or colleague. The import/export format is a plain-text file with one address per line.

Defining safe recipients

The safe recipients list, located on another tab in the Junk E-Mail Options dialog box, is similar to the safe senders list but it marks messages as okay based on their recipients rather than their sender. This is useful when you are on a distribution list or in another situation in which you receive e-mails that are sent to a list of recipients, including you. When an e-mail address is on the safe recipients list, any message sent to you and to that address will never be treated as spam, regardless of the message sender and content. The Safe Recipients tab works exactly the same as the Safe Senders tab, described in the previous section.

Defining blocked senders

A blocked sender is an e-mail address or domain whose messages are always treated as spam. The Blocked Senders tab in the Junk E-Mail Options dialog box works exactly like the Safe Senders tab as described earlier.

International junk e-mail options

You may receive some e-mails that appear to be gibberish—random, meaningless characters. These messages occur when a sender’s e-mail program uses a different character encoding than the one you are using.

For example, a person in China likely uses Chinese encoding to create a message in Chinese characters. If your e-mail reader is set to use, say, English encoding, the message displays as gibberish. Outlook lets you block messages that use specified character encodings. It also lets you block e-mails from certain countries based on the top-level domain of the sender’s address. Here are the steps to follow:

1.	Choose Tools Options from the main Outlook window to display the Options dialog box.
2.	On the Preferences tab, click the Junk E-Mail button. Outlook displays the Junk E-Mail dialog box.
3.	If necessary, click the International tab.
4.	To block top-level domains, click the Blocked Top-Level Domains button to display a list of domains (Figure 28-3). Figure 28-3. Specifying top-level domains to block.
5.	Select the domains you want to block and then click OK.
6.	To block character encodings, click the Blocked Encodings List to display a list of encodings (Figure 28-4). Figure 28-4. Specifying character encodings to block.
7.	Select the character encodings you want to block and then click OK.
8.	Click OK to close the Junk E-Mail Options dialog box.

What’s a Top-Level Domain? The top-level domain of an e-mail address is the part after the last period. People in the United States are used to seeing top-level domains such as .com, .org, and .edu that indicate the type or organization. In the rest of the world, however, the top-level domain usually identifies the country of origin—for example, .ca for Canada, .cn for China, and .fr for France. For the United States, .us is used, although rarely.