Entourage 2004 Hardly Handles My Spam

M

Michael M. Cohen

I've switched over to having Entourage 2004 handling my email chores.
I find that the Spam control contained within the program to leaves a
lot to be desired. There is no training the filter and the only
solution that I have come up with is to create rules for offending
domains....not a great solution in my view.

I'd like to get the collective wisdom of the group as to how they are
managing spam.

I've also read a good review of SpamSeive...anyone using that progam?
All recommendations will be duly check out.

Thanks in advance for your wisdom
 
S

Sonjay

Entourage's spam handling is pretty bad. I'm on Office X (not 2004), and
this version of Entourage is subject to crashing on malformed spams. It had
gotten to the point where it was crashing 2 or 3 times day.

I finally set up my mail server to run SpamAssassin, and it's *really* good.
I was previously getting close to 100 spams a day, and SpamAssassin catches
all but one or two per day. And since SpamAssassin catches my spams on the
mail server, they don't get to Entourage to crash it, either.

And in the month or so I've been using it, I've seen no false positives at
all! I'm almost confident enough to start sending spam to dev>null instead
of to a spam folder.
 
B

Barry Wainwright

The JMF in v2004 is very much better than the vX version - not surprisingly,
since the vX version is a couple of years old now, and spam content has
changed.

I find that with the JMF set to 'high' it catches most of my spam, with
almost no false positives. I do, however, try to handle virtually all of my
'expected' mail with rules or MLM entries. If you don't do this the number
of false positives may be higher.

I have seen a few reports where for some people the JMF doesn't seem to be
working properly - it catches virtually nothing, even on the 'exclusive'
setting. Fortunately these instances seem to be rare, and although the MBU
are aware of them, no good repro steps have so far been discovered.

One advantage of the 2004 JMF is that it is capable of being updated via the
'autoupdate daemon' included in Office 2004, so that as time passes by and
the content of the average spam message changes, the JMF can be easily
updated to keep up - a lot more easily than was possible with earlier
versions.
 
S

Sonjay

Thanks for the info, Barry. My JMF is set to high and it doesn't miss much
spam, but it gets a lot of false positives. I do have rules set up for most
of my real mail, and I still get lots of false positives -- it seems like
every time someone writes me who isn't yet in my contact list it gets
filtered as spam (no, I don't have that setting activated to label as spam
anyone who's not in my contact list). SpamAssassin, on the mail server,
always lets through real e-mail, even from people or mailing lists that I
don't have a rule for.

Is the JMF in v2004 still prone to crashing on malformed headers in spam,
like vX is? I dl'd the 2004 trial and didn't see anything to drool over --
but if the crashing problem is fixed that alone might make it worth
upgrading.

Oh, and the autoupdate daemon -- when I was playing with the trial version,
that thing bothered me. I already have M$ phoning home on my PC; I don't
need it doing the same thing on my Mac. Is it possible to disable the update
daemon for good? I'm capable of performing my own updates, thank you. ;)
 
B

Barry Wainwright

Thanks for the info, Barry. My JMF is set to high and it doesn't miss much
spam, but it gets a lot of false positives. I do have rules set up for most
of my real mail, and I still get lots of false positives -- it seems like
every time someone writes me who isn't yet in my contact list it gets
filtered as spam (no, I don't have that setting activated to label as spam
anyone who's not in my contact list). SpamAssassin, on the mail server,
always lets through real e-mail, even from people or mailing lists that I
don't have a rule for.
Click to expand...

Even unfiltered genuine mail rarely gets marked as spam for me, but
conditions can vary greatly.

You can set up 'safe domains' in the Junk Email protection dialog - it may
be worth putting some in there. Alternatively, try doing some filtering by
content - if people regularly write to you on a particular topic, create a
rule to check for keywords that you would expect to receive in either body
or subject and set that mail to 'not junk' etc.
Is the JMF in v2004 still prone to crashing on malformed headers in spam,
like vX is? I dl'd the 2004 trial and didn't see anything to drool over --
but if the crashing problem is fixed that alone might make it worth
upgrading.
Click to expand...

That problem has been fixed.
Oh, and the autoupdate daemon -- when I was playing with the trial version,
that thing bothered me. I already have M$ phoning home on my PC; I don't
need it doing the same thing on my Mac. Is it possible to disable the update
daemon for good? I'm capable of performing my own updates, thank you. ;)
Click to expand...

Yes, dead simple. Just fire up the application "Microsoft Autoupdate" that
office 2004 installs in the Applications folder and check the 'manual' box
instead of the 'automatic' box.
 
S

Sonjay

That problem has been fixed.
Click to expand...

That's good to know.
Yes, dead simple. Just fire up the application "Microsoft Autoupdate" that
office 2004 installs in the Applications folder and check the 'manual' box
instead of the 'automatic' box.
Click to expand...
Also good to know.

I might get around to upgrading after all. Thanks for the info.
 
Top