How To: Identify Users as Safe or Blocked

Continuing a series of posts demonstrating how to control spam effectively in MS Outlook, we will now look at identifying senders as Safe or Blocked.

Identifying Users as ‘Safe’ or ‘Blocked’

1. When reading an email, you have the option to identify the sender as a Safe Sender or Blocked Sender. The easiest way to do this is to right-click once on the email and move to the Junk E-mail option in the pop-up menu.

2. As you can see in the picture above, it is very easy to choose which of these two options you want. It is also possible to add a user’s entire domain to the Safe Sender’s list from here. The domain is the part of the email address which follows the @ symbol. For example, if you wanted all users whose email address ends in @ontariotech.ca to be marked as safe senders.
3. You can also identify unusual domains which spam is being sent from, by opening the Junk E-mail Options dialog box (notice it is also accessible from this pop-up menu, as well as the Actions menu).

N.B. Do not add domains such as Yahoo.com or Hotmail.com to either the Safe Senders list, OR the Blocked Senders list, as these are freely available domains that anyone can access.