Filtering with Safe and Block Senders
Both
Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 allow users to create and manage their
own Safe Senders and Blocked Senders. As the name implies, the Safe
Senders list is made up of user-defined addresses or domains, and
messages from these addresses or domains will never be treated as junk
email. Conversely, the Blocked Senders list is made up of user-defined
email addresses or domain names, and all messages from them will
automatically be treated as junk email.
In
addition, both Outlook 2003 and 2007 provide the option to configure a
Safe Recipients list. This option is useful when you are a member of an
emailing list or group. By adding the list or group to your Safe
Recipients list, any messages sent to the email addresses or domain
names on that list will not be treated as junk email messages,
regardless of the sender.
Both
Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 allow you the option to automatically
treat anyone in your Outlook Contacts list as a Safe Sender. This
option is enabled on the Safe Senders tab by selecting the Also Trust
E-Mail from My Contacts check box. By default, this feature is enabled.
In
addition, with Outlook 2003 SP1 and later, there is an additional
option. If there are people who are not in your Contacts list, but with
whom you regularly correspond, you can select to Automatically Add
People I E-Mail to the Safe Senders List. This option is also found on
the Safe Senders tab.
To quickly add a
sender, domain name, or mailing list to one of these lists, you can
right-click the message, select Junk E-Mail, and choose the desired
option.
Outlook Email Postmark
In
Outlook 2007, the concept of the Outlook Email Postmark is introduced.
This feature helps ensure that email placed in the client’s Inbox is
valid, and that email sent by Outlook 2007 will be trusted by the
recipient’s email client.
Microsoft has
developed this new technology as part of their ongoing effort to
minimize junk email. When using the Email Postmark, the sending
computer performs a computation, and assigns the resulting work as a
token that the email is valid. By making the computation and sending of
the message time consuming and resource intensive, mass emailers will
find the process detrimental to their productivity; however, the
process does not change the user experience for normal email senders.
Exchange
Server 2007, upon receiving a message with an Email Postmark, uses it
as one method of verification of the reliability of the incoming
message.
Blocking Read Receipts
Both
Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 enable users to request read receipts for
the messages that they send. Read receipts tell the sender that the
intended recipient has at least opened the email. Automatically sending
these read receipts can offer spammers (or others) more insight into
your mail reading habits than you might want to share.
By
default, both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 block the automatic sending
of read receipts. Instead, the recipient is prompted with a message
that asks them if they want to send a response.
If
you want, you can change this setting to Always Send a Response, or
Never Send a Response. To change this behavior, do the following:
1. | In Outlook, select Tools, Options.
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2. | On the Preferences tab, in the E-Mail section, click E-Mail Options.
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3. | Click the Tracking Options button.
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4. | Select your desired setting, and then click OK three times to exit the configuration.
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Information Rights Management
Introduced
in Microsoft Office 2003 products, Information Rights Management (IRM)
helps organizations protect digital information from unauthorized use.
By integrating with a Windows Server 2003 technology called Microsoft
Windows Rights Management Services (RMS), IRM enables workers to define
how a recipient can use the information contained in a Microsoft Office
document.
Users can define exactly who can
open, modify, print, forward, or take other actions with protected
documents. In addition, users can specify an expiration date, after
which the document cannot be viewed or acted upon.
Note
To
create IRM-protected documents and email messages, the sending user
must be using the Professional or Enterprise version of Office 2007.
Users of Office Standard 2007 can still read and use IRM-protected
documents, but cannot create them or apply policies to email messages.
IRM
granularizes security for supported Microsoft Office applications such
as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, as well as any other IRM-aware
application. IRM is intended to complement other security technologies,
such as Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) and
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) by securing the contents of information
(contained in a document, for example), but it does not provide
authentication to the information.
