Once you configure it and make adjustments for false positives, the filtering technology built into Outlook 2007 can be an effective tool for waging your daily fight against junk e-mail. The filtering technology in Outlook 2007 isn’t perfect, however, so you might need to handle junk e-mail in other ways. One technique is to create your own rules to handle exceptions that the built-in filters can’t adequately address.
You can create rules that look explicitly for keywords or phrases in the subject or body of a message or look for specific other criteria and then move those messages to the Junk E-Mail folder (or delete them). See Chapter 11, for details on creating and working with rules.
Reply or Unsubscribe?
Although you might be tempted to have Outlook 2007 automatically send a nasty reply to every piece of spam you receive, resist the urge. In many cases, the spammer’s only way of knowing whether a recipient address is valid is when a reply comes back from that address. You make your address that much more desirable to spammers when you reply, because they then know that there’s a person at the other end of the address. The best course of action is to delete the message without looking at it.
In the past, many spammers also used unsubscribe messages to identify valid addresses, which made unsubscribing to a particular spammer a hit-or-miss proposition. In some cases, the spammer would delete your address, and in others, simply add your address to the good e-mail address list. With state and federal laws like CAN-SPAM and individuals and companies becoming more litigious, spammers more often than not heed unsubscribe requests. Just a few years ago, we would have recommended that you not bother unsubscribing to spam. Today, you will likely have at least a little better luck unsubscribing to spam without generating a flood of new messages. However, you should still approach the problem cautiously.