Outlook 2003 Junkmail Filter Deleting Microsoft Security Bulletins?
Hmmm... Even though I'm using SpamNet* for my spam filtering now, when I reinstalled Outlook 2003 over the weekend, I decide to give the "new and improved" built-in junk mail filter from Microsoft a try to see if it really has improved. I set the threshold to agressively scan for spam and told it to put suspected spam in the "Junk E-mail" folder. When I looked in the folder this morning, lo and behold there was a Microsoft Security Bulletin filtered as spam! This seems to go against their Trustworthy Computing initiative in a bad way. My line of business requires that we act immediately on all security bulletins; missing one security bulletin is a very serious issue. Thankfully, I have other sources of being notified of security issues.
I'll be submitting a report to the Office 2003 Beta team to see what they have to say about this. I guess Microsoft should build something into their filtering algorithm to at least say that anything coming from their security email address is on the "white list".
* I mentioned SpamNet in a previous posting. Since that time, version 1.0 has been officially released. With the release they've now implemented a monthly fee of $4.99 USD to use the service. I kind of expected that they might charge for the product at some point and, to be honest, I'm glad. I've found that totally free spam filtering solutions eventually run into the problem of such huge demand on the service that it either becomes uselessly slow, or just folds for financial reasons. I think they've done the right thing by pricing the service at a reasonable rate - I'll easily save that amount in the amount of time it used to take to filter out spam manually. Based on the success I've had in using SpamNet, I'm going to be signing up as soon as the 30 day trial is out.
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MAPILab Ltd. pleased to announce the article “Microsoft Outlook 2003 Spam Filter: Under the hood”. This article describes in details how the built-in Microsoft Outlook 2003 junk mail filter based on “state-of-the-art technology developed by Microsoft Research” works.
This article point to critical holes of Microsoft technology and will very useful to technical specialists and non-technical readers who interested in spam protection technologies. Software developers will find a couple of exercises we've prepared for them to check if they have learnt to detect junk mail with up-to-six-decimal-digits accuracy, as the filter does.
Full version of the article is available in Internet here: http://www.mapilab.com/articles/outlook_spam_filter.html
Posted by: Maria Turina | November 11, 2003 05:25 AM