Iowa State University IT

Coping with Spam Using Microsoft Entourage

1 What is Spam?

Spam is a slang term for unsolicited commercial email.

2 Why Do I Get Spam?

It's simple. Because your email address is widely distributed, it gets put into electronic mailing lists. If you have put your email address on a webpage, used it to post to an online forum or newsgroup, or included it when filling out a form on a commercial website, more than likely your address will wind up in a commercial mailing list. Some Windows viruses are believed to harvest email addresses from the files of the machines they infect and send them to spammers.

3 How Can I Make Spam Go Away?

You will probably never be able to completely eliminate spam from your inbox. Even the best of filters will only catch part of the junk mail sent to you. Even if you change your email address, it will only give you a brief respite until your new address is harvested from somewhere on the web. However, there are steps you can take to reduce the amount of spam you receive.

Unsubscribe from groups you are no longer using

Some of the spam you receive probably is not precisely spam. If you signed up for something on a webpage, such as requesting information or downloading or registering a software package you purchased, you may have inadvertently asked them to send you mail--and that is not spam.

If you really have subscribed to a newsletter and you no longer want to receive it, unsubscribe from it. Check the text of the message; there is often an unsubscribe link or an email address to send a message to be removed from the list. However, do not try this on unsolicited email messages, since less scrupulous spammers will simply use your unsubscribe request as an indication that your email address is active and send you more spam.

Use an alternative email address in commercial webpages

Instead of using your primary email address to sign in to commercial webpages, establish another account with one of the free providers like Gmail, AOL, Yahoo or Windows Live Mail, and use that address instead. That way, you will keep your spam separate from the real messages. Be polite, though; log in to those accounts periodically and delete the spam.

Use filters in your email client

Most of the email clients you can use to read email give you filters to sort your mail into different mailboxes based on sender, subject, and other criteria. Those filters can be used to make spam go away as well.

To help your mail client in this quest, Iowa State has provided a "spam tagging" system called PerlMX. This system examines all the messages that come to @iastate.edu addresses from outside the university and calculates the probability that the message is spam. That information is placed in a special header that you will not normally see, but which most mail clients use to filter the email into spam and non-spam categories.

4 Using Junk Email Protection with Microsoft Entourage

Microsoft Entourage has a Junk E-Mail filtering option using Microsoft's SmartScreen technology. It is a "trainable" filter, that is, you tell it which messages are legitimate and which are spam. Gradually it learns your mail mix and after a while, it becomes very accurate.

Junk mail messages are filtered into a "Junk E-Mail" mailbox for each mail account, and can even be automatically deleted. Or you can open the Junk E-Mail folder, read messages that have been misfiled, and move them back into the Inbox folder. In addition to the built-in junk email filters, you can also use custom rules that you create.

4.1 Built-in Junk Email Protection

4.1.1 Training Entourage's Junk Email Protection

When first installed, Entourage has a generic idea of what spam is. It will move messages it believes to be junk into the Junk E-mail mailbox. To increase the accuracy of the filters, you must train Entourage in what you believe is or is not spam. Your responsibility is to train Entourage as to what is spam and what isn't.

To identify a message as spam, highlight the message title in the Inbox message list and click the "Junk" icon in the Inbox window. You may also press <Shift/Command/J> or choose Message -> Mark As Junk. You can hold down the Command key and click multiple messages to junk several messages in one operation.

If a message isn't junk but Entourage says it is, click "This message is not junk" on the message's Info Bar, click the "Not Junk" button on the Inbox toolbar, press <Option/Shift/Command/J>, or choose Message -> Mark As Not Junk. When you choose to "dejunk" a message, Entourage will ask which way you want to proceed:

Periodically, you should check the Junk E-Mail folder for each mail account to see if any legitimate messages have been misfiled. If there are, highlight them and click the "Not Junk" button. The messages will be returned to the Inbox folder for that account and Entourage will learn that messages like those are not junk.

4.1.2 Automatically Deleting Junk Email

By default, Entourage simply sends spam to the Junk mailbox, but doesn't do anything else with it. You can tell Entourage to discard this mail automatically after the mail has been there for some time.

  1. Select Tools -> Junk E-mail Protection.
  2. Turn on "Delete messages from the Junk E-mail folder older than" and set a number of days (30 is the default).
  3. Click OK.

4.1.3 Adjusting the Whitelist

A whitelist is a list of addresses that you accept mail from, no matter what the mail looks like. Entourage uses the Address Book and the Safe Domains list together as a whitelist and accepts mail from any address appearing in either place. To add a domain to the Safe Domains list, do the following:

  1. Select Tools -> Junk E-mail Protection.
  2. Click "Safe Domains".
  3. A list of domains will appear. This list is actually a single line of text. To add a domain, put the cursor at the end of the list, type a comma, then type the name of the domain.
  4. Click OK.

Entourage will also accept any mail message covered by a mailing list rule. This can be used to accept mail sent to a particular address, i.e., by unknown senders to a mailing list. To add a mailing list rule, do the following:

  1. Select Tools -> Mailing List Manager.
  2. Click New.
  3. Enter a name for the rule under "Name".
  4. Enter the address for the mailing list under "List address".
  5. (Optional) If you want to move mail for the list to a folder, check the box by "Move messages to folder" and specify a folder to store mail to the list using the pulldown menu to the right.
  6. Click OK.

4.2 Additional Filters

To file a message you have received into a folder or delete it automatically, do the following:

  1. If the message is in a Junk mailbox, highlight it and select Message -> Not Junk. Return to the Inbox mailbox by selecting Mailbox -> Go to -> In.
  2. In the In mailbox, highlight the message and select Tools -> Rules.
  3. Rules in Entourage are categorized by the protocol used to fetch the mail: POP, IMAP, Hotmail, or Exchange. Click the tab for the mail account you'll be filtering. (Addresses ending in "mail.adp.iastate.edu" are Exchange accounts.)
  4. Click "New".
  5. Enter a name for the rule under "Name".
  6. Entourage will automatically select all messages. The rule can be based on the From, To, Any Recipient, or Subject lines (as well as more esoteric criteria). To select something else, click on the arrow button to the right of "All messages" and choose from the drop-down menu.
  7. If you select "Subject", make sure the subject line doesn't contain any specific information (like a date). Mail normally checks to see if the string given appears in the Subject line. It's not an exact match, so edit out anything that won't appear again.
  8. Under "Then" you can select many options including "Move Message", "Delete Message", and "Run Applescript". Choose "Move Message" to transfer the message to a new folder.
  9. If you selected "Move Message", choose the folder to which to move the message from the folder menu at the right. If you want to create a new folder, select "Choose folder", then click "New folder" in the browse window that appears.
  10. Click OK.

4.3 Using PerlMX Headers Explicitly

Iowa State has provided a "spam tagging" system called PerlMX, which examines all the messages that come to @iastate.edu addresses from outside the university and calculates the probability that the message is spam. That information is placed in a special header that you will not normally see, but which most mail clients use to filter the email into spam and non-spam categories.

While Entourage's junk mail filtering is pretty good, some people prefer to use the PerlMX scores directly like this:

  1. Select Tools -> Rules.
  2. Rules in Entourage are categorized by the protocol used to fetch the mail: POP, IMAP, Hotmail, or Exchange. Click the tab for the mail account you'll be filtering. (Addresses ending in "mail.adp.iastate.edu" are Exchange accounts.)
  3. Click "New".
  4. Under Name, enter "ISU PerlMX".
  5. Click the "All messages" button and select "Specific Header".
  6. In the text box to the right of "Specific Header" enter "X-PerlMX-Spam."
  7. In the field to the right of "Contains", enter "Gauge=XXXXX". This will filter on a PerlMX score of 50 percent (one X for each 10 percent); add or subtract letters as appropriate.
  8. Under "Then" choose "Change Status" in the left menu and "Junk E-mail" in the right menu.
  9. Click OK.

If you feel you need more granularity than every 10 percent, you'll need to create filters for the next 10 percent up and for each of the gauges below that percentage. Suppose you'd like to set the threshold at 47 percent. You'll need separate filters for the X-Perlmx-Spam header containing "Gauge=XXXXX", "Gauge=XXXXIIIIIIIII", "Gauge=XXXXIIIIIIII", and "Gauge=XXXXIIIIIII". Since the PerlMX headers are not an exact science anyway, this may be more effort than it's worth.

5 More Help

For more assistance, contact the Solution Center by phone at 515-294-4000, on the web at http://www.it.iastate.edu/help/, by email at solution@iastate.edu, or in person at 195 Durham Center.