How to stop subtext being classified as junk mail

General advice (from Alan Phillips, Mail Team Leader, ISS)

Built in to Outlook is a 'junk mail filter', which is a set of spam-detection rules and actions that Microsoft have defined. They don't tell anyone what the detection rules are, or how it works, and there are only three things an Outlook user can do to control it:

  1. set it to 'highly sensitive', 'middling sensitive', 'not very sensitive' or 'keep your hands off my e-mail';
  2. set it either to move what it thinks of as spam to the 'Junk Mail' folder, or to delete it completely (really, really not recommended);
  3. tell it to treat any e-mail from specified addresses as quite normal proper mail that you really want to read (see below).

What will be happening with subtext is that for whatever reason, the Outlook junk mail filter thinks it's spam. Judicious application of (1), (2) or (3) above will let you control this; there's no way to tell exactly what it is about the text that's made it think this.

The ISS Staff Help desk (extension 10987) will be very happy to show you how to control Inbox rules, or to tame the Outlook junk mail filter - give them a call and your subtext will be there in your Inbox waiting for you.

Specific tips for Outlook 2003

To stop emails from a specific address being classified as junk mail, you can add either the sender's e-mail address or their domain name to the 'Safe Senders' list. To do this with subtext:

  1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
  2. On the Preferences tab, under E-mail, click Junk E-mail.
  3. Click the Safe Senders or Safe Recipients tab.
  4. Click Add.
  5. In the 'Enter an e-mail address or Internet domain name to be added to the list' box, enter 'subtext-editors@lancaster.ac.uk', and then click OK.

Instead, you can tell Outlook you want all your Contacts to be considered safe senders, select the 'Also trust e-mail from my Contacts' check box on the Safe Senders tab. By default, the check box is selected. All e-mail addresses in your Contacts folder will then be used by the Junk E-mail Filter to evaluate messages. Then, if you add 'subtext-editors@lancaster.ac.uk' to your Contacts, future issues of subtext will not be classed as junk mail.