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The new Junk E-mail Filter is designed to work with other Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 features to help prevent many of the unwanted e-mail messages that you receive every day. It uses state-of-the-art technology developed by Microsoft Research to evaluate whether a message should be treated as junk e-mail based on several factors, such as the time it was sent and the content of the message. The filter does not single out any particular sender or type of message; it is based on the content of the message in general and uses advanced analysis of the structure of the message to determine the probability that it is junk e-mail. By default, this filter is set to a low setting that is designed to catch the most obvious junk e-mail. Any message that is caught by the filter is moved to a special Junk E-mail folder, where you can retrieve or review it at a later time.
You can add message senders to the Safe Senders List so that their messages will never be treated as junk e-mail. Contacts are automatically trusted by default, so messages from people in your Contacts folder will also never be treated as junk e-mail. You can configure Outlook to only accept messages from the Safe Senders List, giving you total control over which messages reach your Inbox. You can easily block messages from a certain e-mail address or domain name by adding the sender to the Blocked Senders List. If you belong to a mailing list, you can add the address for the list to your Safe Recipients List so that messages sent to the mailing list will not be treated as junk e-mail. In addition, if you are using a Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail account, messages from within your organization will never be treated as junk e-mail, regardless of the content of the message.
Quick Flags Click the flag icon next to any e-mail message to quickly flag it for follow-up. Multiple colored flags make it easy to categorize and find your messages. Only items you mark for follow-up are displayed in the For Follow Up Search Folder, which contains an up-to-date list of all Quick Flagged messages in all your e-mail folders.
Search Folders Search Folders are virtual folders that contain views of all e-mail items matching specific search criteria. The e-mail messages shown remain stored in one or more Outlook folders. When you create a Search Folder, you have a number of options to choose from, such as Mail with attachments or Mail from specific people. You can also create your own custom Search Folders, defining specific search criteria that e-mail messages must meet to be displayed in the Search Folder. You can think of each Search Folder as a saved search that is kept up-to-date, always monitoring all your folders for any item that matches that Search Folder's search criteria.
Search Folders can be quickly set up with a number of predesigned options, such as Mail sent to distribution lists or Mail from and to specific people. You can see all the unread e-mail messages from every folder in your mailbox in a Search Folder named Unread Mail. To help you reduce the size of your mailbox, the Large Mail Search Folder shows you the largest messages in your mailbox, regardless of what folder the messages are stored in.
Desktop Alerts The new Desktop Alert improves on the audio New E-mail Message alert. The New Mail Desktop Alert fades in subtly with the sender's name, subject, and a short text preview, so you can immediately see whether the new message is urgent, should be marked for follow-up, or can be safely ignored without interrupting your work in another program. The Desktop Alert contains buttons to open, flag, or delete the e-mail message and fades out just as subtly as it faded in if it is ignored.
Rules Creating and organizing rules is now easier. You can create your own rules from scratch by using the familiar Outlook Rules Wizard, or you can choose from several ready-made rules that people typically use to manage incoming messages or stay informed. For example, you can use the ready-made rule Send an alert to my mobile device when I get messages from someone to keep informed of meeting changes if you are on the road. Or you can use the ready-made rule Flag messages from someone with a colored flag to automatically flag and prioritize messages from your boss. You can quickly create rules to file e-mail messages by clicking the message and then clicking Create Rule on the toolbar. Your rules list also provides an “at a glance” summary of your rules. Each rule now displays an icon for each action you specify, allowing you to see what a rule does without having to open it. You can now apply rules to incoming meeting requests and meeting updates as well as e-mail messages.
Create and manage alerts If your organization uses Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server to store and manage documents on a Web site, you can receive an e-mail notification when content on the Web site changes. Alerts notify you of changes to documents, list items, document libraries, lists, surveys, or even search results, helping you to be more effective by easily staying up-to-date with relevant information. To use alerts, click Alert Me links in any SharePoint Portal Server Web site, or select Rules and Alerts on the Tools menu in Outlook, and then click the Manage Alerts tab. You can create alerts for lists and libraries, as well as for individual items and any files in them. You can also specify the kinds of changes that you want to be notified of. For example, you can receive an alert when an item or file is added, modified, or deleted.
Enhanced privacy features Messages in HTML format often include pictures or sounds. Sometimes these pictures or sounds are not included in the message itself but are instead downloaded from a Web server when the e-mail message is opened or previewed. Junk e-mail senders have used this capability to their advantage by including something called a "Web beacon" in these messages. A Web beacon notifies the Web server when you read or preview the message, thus validating the e-mail address and often resulting in more junk e-mail being sent to you. To help protect your privacy and combat Web beacons, Outlook is configured by default to block download of this external content from the Internet. If an e-mail message tries to connect unannounced to a Web server on the Internet, Outlook blocks that connection until you decide to view the content. This feature also allows you to avoid viewing potentially offensive messages and, if you are on a low-bandwidth connection, to decide whether an image warrants the time and bandwidth to download it.
E-mail messages with restricted permission Information Rights Management (IRM) in Outlook allows you to create messages with restricted permission to help prevent messages from being forwarded, printed, copied, or edited by unauthorized people. The sender clicks Do Not Forward on the Standard toolbar to restrict permission for the message.